31st January, Dominic Winters Auction

The Dominic Winter’s 31st January 2024 auction will see the second part of the sale of the Library of the Late Christopher Foyle of Beeleigh Abbey, which includes 20 letters to Joseph Conrad (Lot 290), with an estimate of £200-300.

More here: Lot 290 – Conrad (Joseph). Twenty Letters to Joseph (dominicwinter.co.uk)

About the Foyle Collection

William Foyle (1883-1963), one of the greatest booksellers of the 20th century, was the co-founder with his brother Gilbert of the eponymous and iconic London bookshop on Charing Cross Road.

Having purchased the former medieval monastery of Beeleigh Abbey in 1943, William built an impressive and unrivalled personal library of manuscripts and books on English history and literature, European and world history and discovery, which he housed in the beautiful former monastic dormitory.

After William’s death in 1963 the abbey and library passed to his daughter Christina, who ran the Foyle’s empire in a notoriously idiosyncratic manner until her own death in 1999.

Following Christina’s death the abbey and library were sold. This landmark 3-day sale of the Foyle Library by Christie’s took place in July 2000, and at the time stood as the most valuable English private library ever to be offered in Britain or Europe.

With much international fanfare the sale achieved a world record total, but it was not common knowledge that, in a private arrangement with the auction house prior to sale, a significant portion of the original collection was acquired by William’s grandson Christopher, the nephew of Christina.

Christopher and his wife Catherine were also able to buy the abbey, and so not only did Christopher work to revive the Foyle’s bookshop brand but he also rebuilt the book collection and, with Catherine, undertook a significant and sympathetic restoration of the abbey and gardens to much public acclaim.

Following the highly successful sale of the first portion of treasured texts collected by both William and Christopher Foyle by Dominic Winter Auctioneers on 27 September 2023, we are delighted to present the final portion of the Foyle Library for sale by auction.

While the first part was rich in illuminated Books of Hours and printed texts from the Renaissance and early modern period, this second portion generally lays stronger emphasis on the Georgian and Victorian eras, although there are early printed books and manuscripts, including a trove of medieval and later Essex documents, as well as 17th-century English literature and history.

The lion’s share of the sale comprises books from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which the dominant theme is fine leather bindings bound by Zaehnsdorf, Sangorski & Sutcliffe, Riviere, Bayntun, et al. On a closer look however, it becomes apparent that many of the books in this remarkable collection have at least one second string to their bow.

Within this catalogue are to be found numerous books with fore-edge paintings, Cosway-style bindings with miniatures (mostly commissioned by William Foyle from Bayntun Riviere following the firms’ merger in 1939), and dozens of profusely extra-illustrated works. The extra illustrations comprise not only period and earlier engravings but watercolours and many notable autograph letters. One such example can be found at lot 252; this two-volume work of the life and adventures of the writer George Sala has been expanded into 9 volumes by the insertion over 300 autograph letters and countless portraits and views by the infamous book grangeriser Alexander Meyrick Broadley (1847-1916).

The names of William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens appear several times throughout the catalogue, in manuscript and print, so it is fitting that the sale has an intriguing contemporary oil portrait of the young Charles Dickens, and an oil version of the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, formerly belonging to the famous Shakespeare collector, the Earl of Warwick. The sale concludes with library furniture from the Foyle library at Beeleigh Abbey and as the tail-piece to the Foyle Library story, a fine marble bust of Shakespeare after Roubiliac.