Sir Brooke Boothby's Fonmon Castle Library and Rare Mathematic Treatise to Auction

Tennants Auctioneers’ Books, Maps and Manuscripts Sale tomorrow (April 9) will include 43 lots that are the property of Sir Brooke Boothby removed from Fonmon Castle, Glamorgan. 

The Fonmon Library comprised three family collections, firstly, that of the Seys family primarily collected by Evan Seys (1604-1685) who studied at Christ Church Oxford and was a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, serving as Attorney General under Oliver Cromwell and as an MP after the restoration as well as being an antiquarian scholar. 

The library was subsequently added to by 10 generations of the Jones and Boothby families, all of whom placed great importance on maintaining and expanding the Fonmon Castle Library. Notable contributors included Colonel Philip Jones in the 17th century, and Robert Jones III who married the Seys heiress and created the elegant Georgian room, decorated by Thomas Stocking in the 1750s which housed the majority of the library until recent years. In the 20th century, further books entered the collection from the Boothby’s ancestral family home, Ashbourne Hall, which was sold in 1861.

Highlights of the Fonmon Library include:

• John Ogilby’s Britannia: or the Kingdom of England and Dominion of Wales Actually Survey’d…, a relatively scarce copy of the second edition of Ogilby’s landmark atlas published in 1698 (estimate: £1,500-£2,500)
• a copy of The History of Java by Thomas Stamford Raffles published in 1817 which includes hand-coloured aquatints depicting Javanese life and costume (estimate: £700-£1,000)
• a manuscript document appointing Philip Lord Jones of Fonmon as a governor of Charterhouse (estimate: £200-300)

The auction will also feature the rare mathematic treatise Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (1801) by Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), a German mathematician and astronomer who excelled across numerous fields of science. It was written when he was just 21. With an estimate of £8,000-£12,000, the book, which is written in Latin, focuses on number theory. Highly influential, it paved the way for 19th century mathematicians and was still an important foundation text into the 20th century. Copies of this first edition rarely appear at auction.

Also of interest is a set of three Egypt and Middle East Travel Journals written by George W. Mounsey in 1858 and 1859 (estimate: £400-600). Mounsey (later Mounsey-Heysham) was a lawyer from Cumbria who later lived in London, and his journals chart a fascinating trip through Egypt and the Middle East with his travelling companions, one of whom was the artist Hercules Brabazon Brabazon. Comprising diary entries, prose accounts, sketches and watercolours of landscapes, people, flora and ruins, and descriptions of confrontations with Bedouin tribes, the journals provide a fascinating glimpse of an extraordinary journey.  

Other notable lots in the sale include:

• botanical catalogues by the eminent 17th century naturalist John Ray including Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium… (estimate: £800-1,200)
• a copy of A History of the University of Oxford, Its Colleges, Halls, and Public Buildings published by Rudolph Ackermann in 1814 (estimate: £1,000-1,500)
• a scarce set of 28 broadside poems by Ted Hughes, entitled The Cat and the Cuckoo and illustrated by R.J. Lloyd (estimate: £800-1,200). Only 200 signed copies of each broadside were published, and a complete set of all 28are a rare find. The present set is hand numbered 1/200