What makes a book of birds worth £7 million?
Source: London Evening Standard
by: Jim McCue
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the sale of a copy of Audubon's Birds of America on Tuesday at Sotheby's for £7,321,250 is that it is not an especially rare book.
But it doesn't take a book collector to see that it is a exceptionally beautiful and astonishing one.
Michael Tollemache, the dealer who bought it this week, told me that Audubon had always been a “heroic figure” for him, and described this particularly desirable copy as “priceless”.
From the time the great ornithologist conceived the idea of painting all of America's birds in their natural habitats, in the 1820s, it took more than a decade to locate them (and often shoot them). The scale of his ambition exceeded the resources of America's publishers, and the book was finally published in Britain in 1838.
He spent an astonishing $115,000 on the enterprise, and the book cost its subscribers $1,000. For this they received 435 enormous, hand-coloured plates. The four “double-elephant” volumes stand more than three feet tall, and the book is said to be the only one ever to have been delivered in crates with wheels.
A book this conspicuous tends not to suffer the dog-earing, coffee rings and scuffing that lesser books are prey to, and of fewer than 200 copies printed, 119 are known to survive. So in absolute terms, with more than a dozen in Britain alone, this is not a rare book.
To some dealers, its sale will be less exciting than the discovery in 2006 of the only copy of a Shelley poem printed in 1811. When books that are genuinely unique like this turn up, they tend to be bought by institutional libraries, so there may never be another chance to buy them.
By comparison, copies of magnificent books like the Audubon or Shakespeare's First Folio still come round quite regularly at auction, so that they become a kind of index.
So what is this an index of? Michael Tollemache is not a book dealer but an art dealer. “Of course they are not books,” he told me yesterday. “They just happen to have been bound. This tells us absolutely nothing about the book market in general.”
Although he bought it for stock, he knows that a huge, impressive series of paintings will appeal to the super-rich. They needn't know anything about books, or even read the language.
It is no coincidence that the world record for English furniture was broken on Tuesday too, with a Chippendale commode selling for £3,793,250.
With returns on the financial markets being so uncertain, these are investments in a global league where the very best can reach almost any price. Only a month ago a Chinese vase went to 40 times its high estimate, making £51 million.
Lower down the scale, though, books have not kept pace with inflation over the past decade. If you don't insist on having the best copy in the world, you can buy a first or early edition of the majority of our great works of literature for less than £1,000, many for less than £50.
World Most Expensive Book Sells for 11.5MM Dollars
Source: Guardian.co.uk
A copy of John James Audubon's Birds of America tonight became the most expensive book ever sold when it went under the hammer at Sotheby's for £7.3m. The auction was a rare chance to own one of the best preserved editions of the 19th century masterpiece, with its 435 hand-coloured illustrations, seen as a key volume on US natural history.
It was sold to an anonymous collector bidding by telephone, the auction house said. Each individual picture is so valuable there have been some fears the volume could be broken up and sold as 435 separate works of art. Experts believe that unlikely: the tome is probably more valuable intact.
And collectors hold Audobon in such reverence that the notion of ripping apart a perfect copy would be akin to sacrilege.
"Audubon's Birds holds a special place in the rare book market for several reasons," said Heather O'Donnell, a specialist with Bauman Rare Books in New York. "The book is a major original contribution to the study of natural history in the New World.
"It's also one of the most visually stunning books in the history of print: The scale of the images, the originality of each composition, the brilliance of the hand coloring."
The Birds of America plates were printed in black and white and hand-coloured afterwards, and made from engravings of Audubon's watercolours. The book measures more than 3 ft by 2 ft (90 cm by 60cm) because he wanted to paint the birds life size.
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