Spiritual Instruction Manual Leads Books, Maps and Manuscripts Sale

Among many lots achieving prices well above estimate at Tennants Auctioneers' latest sale was a small collection of religious manuscripts predominantly dating from the 17th and 18th centuries which sold in six lots for a combined hammer price of £9,630. 

The top lot in the collection was a Spiritual Instruction Manual written in 1648 for ‘My Only Friend Mrs I.G.’ by the unknown ‘S.G. alias E.C.’, which sold for £3,200. A 1949 handwritten note at the rear of the manuscript suggests a possible candidate for the author is a Dr Stephen Goffe. A Religious Commonplace Book of Alethea Langdale dating from the early 18th century was sold together with two further manuscripts for £650. A note at the beginning of the manuscript suggests that Alethea Langdale was likely a student at St Monica’s, Louvain, which later moved to Newton Abbot in Devon.

Elsewhere in the sale, a first edition of Richard Blome’s important work on the English colonies in America and the West Indies, The Present State of His Majesties Isles and Territories of America (1687), sold for £3,000 and included engraved folding maps after Robert Morden. 

From the Victorian era were a group of Rome photographs which included 26 albumen print photographs of Roman landmarks such as the Forum, the Colosseum and the Temple of Vesta (sold for £1,000), and a Victorian autograph album belonging to Charles Wilkinson of Kendal which included the signatures of Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Cardinal Newman and William E. Gladstone (sold for £2,800). A copy of Eugene Grasset’s Plants and the Application to Ornament, published in 1897, went for £2,200. 

A single-sheet public notice Lifting of Dead Bodies (sold for £600) outlined the arrest of two men - James Smith and John Rogers - accused of removing bodies from graves. The pair were discovered removing the bodies of a woman and child from the churchyard in Castle Douglas, Galloway, by a young man passing by in the dead of night. After alerting the neighbours, the pair were pursued and caught. Rogers later "turn’d King’s evidence" and recounted how Smith had been employed for some time lifting bodies and taking them to Edinburgh and had even sold his dead sister having filled her coffin with rubbish.