Definitely Desirable but Not Exactly an Open Book
As a book man at heart, I found it hard to resist front, back, and side views of the lot featured. It was offered in a February 21-23 sale held by Dore & Rees of Frome in the county of Somerset—one that dispersed the extensive and wide-ranging collections of a well-known English dealer and collector, George Withers (1946-2023).
The auctioneers’ own website, I found, did not reveal the selling price, but the piece featured in a report published in the March 23 edition of the UK weekly Antiques Trade Gazette.
There the winning bid was said to be £3800, to which a buyer’s premium of 25% must be added—giving a final price of £4750, or around $6000 at the exchange rate of that time.
And what is the lot?
Well, depending on what it was filled with, it was apparently intended to serve as either a flask or as a hand warmer.
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A Tale of Mr. Pickwick—the Snuffbox Version
Included in a January 30 and 31 sale held by Woolley & Wallis in their Salisbury (Wiltshire) rooms were a number of small silver boxes produced by John Linnit (1785-1868), a London silversmith who specialised in “smallwork” and snuff boxes in particular.
Among them was the example that is illustrated here, a 5.2-ounce silver gilt box by Linnit that proved particularly desirable.
What singled this example out was the decoration to the cover. This was not a topographical or Classical subject, or indeed the popular pedlar figure that features on many of his boxes, but a Dickensian scene in which Mr. Pickwick addresses members of a club that came to bear his name.
The box is dated to 1837, the year in which Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers was first published in book form, following its pseudonymous serialisation under the name “Boz”in the previous year. Woolley & Wallis had guided the lot at £800/1200 ($1015/1520), but there was enough competition on the day to produce a winning price of $11,990.
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Moon Flasks Seen in a Much More Brilliant Light
Initially valued at around $130 or so, the pair of 10" tall blue and white “moon flasks” decorated with bats and peach plants to their central sections went on to sell for a rather more substantial amount and an auction house record, $446,553, in a March 6 sale held by Nesbits, auctioneers of Southsea in southern England.
Entered by a consignor who had been consigning pieces to the auction house as he cleared his late mother’s home, they had been a recent find in the attic.
Though catalogued as 20th century with apocryphal six-character Qianlong (1736-95) marks, the flasks were viewed by others as being of much earlier vintage, and, it seems, shots taken of the vases under ultraviolet light revealed no signs of restoration.
One London dealer remained competitive until around $317,260, but in the end the pair sold to a Chinese bidder—setting a record for any lot ever offered by Nesbits, and by a considerable distance.
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“My Books are Enriching Everybody Connected with Them but Myself”
Among lots offered as part of a March 6 sale conducted by Stride & Son of Chichester were three lots that had a very appealing Dickens family connection.
Highlighted here is a modest gilt-metal pocket watch by a London maker, William Tyas (active 1820-36), that as the accompanying illustration reveals is engraved on the back “Dearest / ‘BOZ’ / Editor CD / Bentleys Miscellany / Dec. 1836.”
Sold at $17,225, it is believed to have been presented to Charles Dickens (“Boz”) to mark his first year at the magazine.
In the years 1837 to 1839 publisher Richard Bentley went on to serialise Oliver Twist in 24 parts, though in that latter year Dickens resigned his editor’s post, calling Bentley a “Burlington Street Brigand” and complaining of being conscious “that my books are enriching everybody connected with them but myself.”
The saleroom said that this and accompanying lesser lots had most likely belonged to Dickens’s youngest and favourite daughter, Catherine, or “Lucifer Box” as he called her, a reference to her fiery temper.
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A Very Valuable Body of Work Indeed
The copy of De humani corporis fabrica libri septem from which this spread is reproduced is only a second edition of this celebrated anatomical work by Andries van Wesele, or Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), as he is much more familiarly referred to, and it was not without its shortcomings.
At Christie’s New York on February 2, however, it was sold for $2,280,000.
It is not a 1543 first edition, and it is uncoloured and lacks a number of text leaves, along with the index, but the autograph annotations and corrections in the author’s hand that it contains—just one of which can be seen in this spread—run into many hundreds.
A report by Richard Fattorini that appeared in the March 30 issue of the UK weekly Antiques Trade Gazette points out that it also includes his notes for a revised and updated third edition—one which in the end was never actually published.
What is equally notable in terms of its saleroom presence and performance is the fact that in 2007 when this copy appeared in a sale held in Germany, it sold for a much more modest sum—one that at today’s exchange rates would be only $17,000 or so!
Originally published in the May 2024 issue of Maine Antique Digest. © 2024 Maine Antique Digest
