The Wardington Library : Incunabula and The Wardington Hours. [ Sotheby's, auction catalogue, sale date 5 December 2006 ]

Sotheby's, London, auction catalogue for the sale held on 5th December 2006. Cloth, 4to, 27 cm,. 124 pp, plates (some colour). 43 lots. From the introduction: "There are forty-six incunabula editions bound in forty-two volumes, one book printed in 1502 (an edition of Filelfo's Epistolae printed in Venice, with its spine wrongly stamped Mediolani 1475), and one Strassburg imprint of 1513 in a interesting Sammelband of two printed books and a manuscript. There are sixteen incunabula printed in the German-speaking lands, twenty-eight in Italy (of which fourteen printed in Venice), one printed in Louvain, and an English fragment. There is nothing printed in France or Spain. For the most part the books are in Latin, aldiough diere are three Greek texts (lots 23, 37 and 38), and two works in Italian (lots 7 and 36). The earliest book is dated 1469 and is from the press of Mentelin (lot 2), and there are another twenty-one printed in the 1470s. There is one book printed on vellum, the Praeparatio evangelica of Eusebius printed by Jenson (lot 18), and there are one or two books widi very handsome decoration, notably the Augustine De civitate Dei, Mainz, 1473 (lot 3), and the Sallust decorated by the Master of the Pico Pliny (lot 35). Although there are three items in eighteenth-century bindings, most of the bindings are nineteenth-century, and many come from one bindery, that of Storr of Grantham, and half the books have one provenance, that of the Thorold library at Syston Park.....This group of some forty three volumes, the last a fine manuscript Book of Hours, illuminated by the Bedford Master in Paris in around 1420, acquired by Lord Wardington in 1958, the printed books largely acquired by his grandfather in the 1880s, marks the end of the dispersal of the library at Wardington Manor. It is a tribute to successive generations of mostly English book collectors, and in particular to the interests of one family, and this final catalogue takes us back to its beginning. Syston Park may have been destroyed, and Wardington Manor severely damaged by fire, but the books are still with us." With indexes of authors and of notable provenances. One or two marks to rear board, Very Good..