Report from the Salerooms

The first British sale with a Byron interest in 2011 was at Lyon and Turnbull in Edinburgh on 26 January. Lot 128 was a copy of the first edition of Hours of Idleness, published by S. and J. Ridge of Newark in 1807. The auctioneers described the book as contemporary half calf, gilt with red label, rubbed, with bookplate. The bookplate was from the library of Gordon Castle. Unfortunately I cannot link the provenance with Byron’s mother, Catherine Gordon of Gight. Megan Boyes in her biography of Mrs Byron, My Amiable Mamma, cites John Malcolm Bulloch’s The House of Gordon as saying that the Gordon lands had been held by two different branches of the family since 1467, so there is probably only a very distant relationship. The book sold at its lower estimate of £700.

In September Lyon and Turnbull sold a copy of the seventeen-volume 1832 John Murray edition of the Works for £500. This was a finely bound set. Bloomsbury Auctions sold another copy, also finely bound and with John Galt’s Life of Byron, for £650 in November. The reason I mention these two lots is that they sold as furnishings rather than as works by Byron. This edition was originally published in cloth (thought to be one of the earliest publisher’s cloth bindings) and can be found online from £300 downwards, while beautifully bound copies can be found in the low thousands.

Staying with Bloomsbury, in January they failed to sell Lot 375 – Manfred: A Dramatic Poem (1817), Mazeppa (1819), The Lament of Tasso, second edition (1817) and The Giaour (1813), in modern wrappers, the first three volumes in modern boards. The estimate was £120–£180. The lot was offered again in March with an estimate of £60–£80 and sold for £60. Unfortunately not all the editions were noted by the auctioneer and I did not view the lot, so it is difficult to draw any conclusions from this except to say that these days the binding does matter, and that a too high estimate can put the buyers off, while a low estimate may encourage bidding. Another possible example of this is a Major Byron forged letter offered by Bloomsbury in December. This is postmarked Genoa and dated 18 January 1824, when Byron was actually in Greece. The estimate was £300–£400. This figure is based on the price realised by the forgery I noted previously in The Byron Journal (39:1), which was estimated at £100-£150 and sold for £320.

Now on to further manuscript material and Sotheby’s sale of 14 July. Lot 32 was an unpublished autograph Byron letter to John Taylor, the proprietor of The Sun newspaper, written from 13 Piccadilly Terrace and dated 27 October 1815. On this single leaf Byron is returning something (now lost) and dismissing a satirical attack on him. With Byron’s letter was an eight-page letter from his mother to an unknown recipient dated Thursday 13 March 1808. Mrs Byron’s topic is her son’s reaction to the negative reviews of Hours of Idleness in the Edinburgh Review. She says: ‘he says if I have any regard for him I never will mention his Poetry to him more as he wishes to forget it’. I viewed the sale, left bids, but was unsuccessful. I watched the auction online. There was a battle for this lot between two bidders, both on the telephone, and it sold to one of them for £11,000 plus, of course, Sotheby’s 25% commission. In a way, Mrs Byron’s ramblings are of more interest than her son’s brief note although the collector will want his hand rather than hers.

Bonhams’ New Bond Street sales are also following a trend for more unique material. In March they sold Part 2 of The Roy Davids Collection – Papers & Portraits. Before running his own business as a dealer in manuscripts and portraits, Mr Davids had been at Sothebys as head of the Book Department. Lots 36 and 37 were Byronic. Lot 36 is described as two portraits, the first being a pencil drawing...