The Roxburghe copy (perfect) was bought by Lord Spencer for £140.
The Earl of Aylesford bought the Marquis of Blandford’s copy (bound with “Treatise of Love,” No. 91) for £32, 10s., and at his sale in 1888 it realised £305. F. Perkins (1889), £100.
S. Alchorne’s copy sold in 1813 for £94, 10s.; Valentine’s copy in 1842 for £5. Blades describes this last in his catalogue list as Alchorne’s; but this is probably a mistake, as Valentine bought J. Inglis’s copy (1826) for £17, 10s.
Sex perelegantissimæ Epistolæ (1483).
24 leaves. The only copy known of this tract was discovered in 1874 by Dr. G. Könnecke, archivist of Marburg, in an old volume of seventeenth-century divinity in the Hecht-Heinean Library at Halberstadt. The discovery was described by Mr. Blades at the time in the Athenæum (Feb. 27, 1875). This copy was bought by the British Museum in 1890 for £250.
Almost as scarce and valuable as Caxtons are the books printed at St. Albans:—
The Chronicle of St. Albans (circa 1484), the second book printed at St. Albans, and the first edition of the Chronicle, was sold at the Earl of Ashburnham’s sale (1897) to Messrs. J. & J. Leighton for £180. It was imperfect, but no absolutely perfect copy is known.
In Quaritch’s catalogue, 1884 (No. 355), a copy with five leaves in facsimile and twenty-two others deficient, was marked £300.
The Boke of St. Albans (1486), a copy perfected in MS., was sold at the Roxburghe sale for £147. It was resold at the White Knights sale for £84. In March 1882 Mr. Quaritch bought it at Christie’s for 600 guineas. The Grenville copy now in the British Museum has gone through many vicissitudes, which were graphically described by Dr. Maitland in 1847. It appears that at the end of the last century the library of Thonock Hall, in the parish of Gainsborough, the seat of the Hickman family, was sorted out by an ignorant person who threw into a condemned heap all books without covers. A gardener who took an interest in heraldry begged permission to take home what he liked from this heap, and he chose among other books The Book of St. Albans. This remained in his cottage till June 1844, when his son’s widow sold 9 lbs. of books to a pedlar for 9d. The pedlar sold the lot for 3s. to a chemist in Gainsborough, who was rather struck by The Book of St. Albans, and tried to sell it, but the neighbours did not wish to buy it. Eventually he obtained £2, 2s. for it from a man who expected to sell it to advantage. The purchaser sold it to Stark the bookseller for £7, 7s. Stark took it to London and sold it to the Right Hon. Thomas Grenville for seventy or eighty guineas. Mr. Blades communicated this account to Notes and Queries (3rd Series, iv. 369).