T.E. Lawrence Presentation Copies at Bonhams

Bonhams fine book sale takes place on 27th March atthe Montpelier Street galleries in Knightsbridge

Highlightsof the sale include the particularly scarce SevenPillars of Wisdom (1926 privately printed edition limited to a runof 170 copies) and The Mint(limited to 50 copies). Both were subject to intense copyright issues leadingto the necessity of their being published quickly and in small numbers. Theseparticular copies were given to Lawrence’s lawyer and joint-trustee of the Revolt in the Desert charitabletrust, Edward Eliot (TheMint through Lawrence’s brother, Arnold) and contain severalinscriptions. Most significant is Lawrence’s dedication in The Seven Pillars in whichhe predicts the legal wrangling to come – “with apologies for the troubles it isgoing to bring...” Additionally this copy contains several loosely insertedsheets including Shaw’s SomeNotes on the Writing of the Seven Pillars and three sheets of pageproofs for the 1922 Oxford edition. 

Cambridge University Library Exhibition

‘Shelf Lives: Four Centuries of Collectors and theirBooks’ celebrates some of the men and women who have donated their libraries toCambridge University over the past four hundred years, and the diverse andextraordinary treasures they owned. It brings together the cream of tenexemplary collections encompassing more than a millennium of the written andprinted word.

The curators of ‘Shelf Lives’ had plenty of material to choose from; CambridgeUniversity Library is home to more than eight million items – stored on mileafter mile of shelving inside the iconic Giles Gilbert Scott building.

Star exhibits include a hand-coloured copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493(a chronicle of world history and one of the most magnificent printed books ofthe fifteenth century, with more than 1,800 woodcuts) presented by ArchbishopMatthew Parker; Napoleon Bonaparte’s copy of Montaigne’s Essais from his library inexile on St Helena; an illuminated ninth-century Mercian prayer-book known asthe Book of Cerne (c.820-840); and the second oldest surviving copy of the Ecclesiastical History of the EnglishPeople by the Venerable Bede (673/4-735) – the celebrated ‘MooreBede’.
A velvet-bound sermon book belonging to QueenElizabeth I and embroidered with her coat of arms will share the exhibitionspace with handwritten manuscripts by John Donne and Virginia Woolf and,perhaps more unusually, trench journals (magazines produced by troops, fortroops) and military money from the Austrian-occupied zone of Italy – part ofthe War Reserve Collection, an extraordinary gathering of at least 10,000pieces of First World War ephemera.

John Wells, Exhibition Curator, explained: “For this exhibition, ten differentcurators have chosen ten different collectors, whose lives span the sixteenthto the twentieth centuries. It really was very difficult to narrow down thefield. “What visitors will experience is really ten mini exhibitions rolledinto one. They can see everything from priceless illuminated manuscripts to Germanpropaganda from the First World War. The central theme drawing these elementstogether is the allure that books and manuscripts have held for collectors overthe centuries – an attraction which thousands of people, from all walks oflife, still feel today.”

Rupert Brooke’s appearance in the exhibition comes via the books andmanuscripts collected by surgeon, scholar and bibliographer Sir GeoffreyKeynes, a friend of the poet from school days. On display will be ‘The Baby’,an unpublished tongue-in-cheek parody by Brooke of fellow poet Algernon CharlesSwinburne’s saccharine production ‘Étude Réaliste’. ‘The Baby’ is far from alost masterpiece, but the manuscript nevertheless reveals a playful and comedicside to Brooke unfamiliar from his iconic War sonnets.

Fellow exhibition curator Ed Potten said: “’Shelf Lives’ isn’t just about thebooks, it’s about the collectors themselves and the history of collecting.There’s a social context to this and interesting questions about why collectingwas – and still is – so significant to people. It’s fascinating to uncover howand why people acquire things. In some cases it is an obsession, and in othersan expression of philanthropy. 


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