We are glad to notice that a manuscript by a young contemporary can command as big a price as ten guineas. This is the sum asked by Messrs. Davis and Orioli for the autograph MS. of Mr. Robert Nichols's The Faun's Holiday, published in his volume of Ardours and Endurances. To buy it would certainly be a speculation; but we believe there is a good chance of the speculation turning out profitably.
*****
Early Editions of Fielding: Messrs. Bowes and Bowes, of Cambridge, are asking £25 for the first edition (two volumes in contemporary calf) of The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his Friend, Mr. Abraham Adams. A copy of the second edition, published in the same year as the first, is offered for 31s. 6d. by the Ex-Officers' Book Union, 16 Rathgar Avenue, West Ealing.
*****
Messrs. Pickering and Chatto are offering a copy of Endymion (Taylor and Hessey, 1818), in the original boards, for £78. Another interesting Keats relic is the original autograph MS. of a portion of Otho the Great, which is offered by Messrs. Maggs Bros. for £60. The MS., entirely in Keats's own writing, is a fragment of the first scene of the play.
*****
We note that a fine copy of Fulke Greville's Poems (1633), of which we recently had occasion to speak, is for sale at Messrs. Dobell's, the price being six guineas.
*****
Messrs. Maggs Bros.' new catalogue, Bibliotheca Aeronautica, price 5s., is a fascinating book. It contains the account of some fifteen hundred volumes dealing with the problem of flight from the earliest times to the present day. The first section contains books published prior to the invention of the Montgolfier Balloon in 1783. A fine copy of Francesco de Lana's Prodromo Overo Saggio di Alcune Inventioni appears in this section (£16 16s.). Paltock's famous flying novel, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, London, 1751, is offered at £15 15s., and the work which Restif de la Bretonne founded on it, La Découverte Australe par un Homme Volant, ou le Dédale Français, at £18 18s. Fine engravings are reproduced from these books.