Report from the Salerooms

The Editor of The Byron Journal invited me to write this article in October 2009, and since then things Byronic have been remarkable quiet in the auction world, except for one large bang. Sotheby's sale of 'Books and Manuscripts from the English Library of Archibald, 5th Earl of Rosebery and Midlothian' in London on 29 October 2009 included a collection of 15 complete autograph letters signed 'Byron', five incomplete letters and lengthy fragments, one brief note, one separate postscript, one short fragment and one address wrapper - in total 71 pages in Byron's hand to his friend Francis Hodgson, with some other related manuscript material. The estimate for this lot was £150,000-£180,000, which seemed quite steep, even though some of the material was, apparently, unpublished. I did not go to the sale - it was a little out of the range of my pocket - but my spies tell me that it was a telephone bid that secured the manuscripts for £277,250. I do not know who bought them, and it seems that nobody yet does. On this occasion Sotheby's high estimate was justified, but in their next English Literature sale, in December 2009, their optimistic estimate of £12,000-£15,000 for a known Byron letter to Henri Beyle dated 29 May 1823 was over-eager. The lot did not sell. In November, Bonhams sold a copy of Byron's 'Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte', a first edition in its original wrapper, for £1,320, but the salerooms have been going through a fallow patch for Romantic literature, so there really is nothing else to report from that quarter.

The C. R. Johnson Rare Book Collections Catalogue 52 included an interesting item of Byroniana, however: Childe Albert, or, the misanthrope, and other poems, imitative and original, published in Edinburgh and London in 1819, and priced at £750. This imitation of Childe Harold was known to Samuel C. Chew, who lists it in the bibliography of his Byron in England: His Fame and After-fame (1924) - but he makes no comment in the body of the work, although he had seen the book, which suggests that he thought it added nothing to the existing knowledge of books about or parodying Byron.

Due to the lack of Byron material currently being offered by auction houses and in dealers catalogues, I thought I should write a little about what has been happening on the Net. The Internet, that double-edged sword, which makes it easier for me to sell books, and for you to find them, but which also makes it much harder for me to be able to buy books with a profit left in them - this wondrous new thing is reducing everyone's real hunting grounds, as bookshops and book fairs decrease in number. But a final word on the real, in passing. The south coast of England is one area that still has enough shops to make a foray worthwhile. Recently I saw several finely bound sets of Byron, so if you are looking for a special present it is worth trying Colin Page of Brighton or A & Y Cummings of Lewes. A quick word about book fairs, too: June is still the big month in the UK, with the Antiquarian Booksellers Association's major fair at Olympia in London and the Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association at the Novotel, Hammersmith. As with all organisations, both these Associations have websites that will tell you about their members, list fairs they organise internationally and across the UK, and link you to further sites selling books.

And now for the virtual, a fingertip hunting ground. There are two very useful websites that search the majority of large bookselling sites. The first is www.addall.com. This site concentrates mainly on English language books although it also looks at the German and French Amazon sites and various national AbeBooks sites (the biggest and best being the American site, www.AbeBooks.com). AbeBooks was one of the earliest commercial bookselling sites. It originated in Canada and has its European headquarters in Germany. Recently it was bought by Amazon but so far...