Dammit. Having failed, yet again, to land myself a Euromillions or Lotto win over the weekend my dreams of having a paddle number at an upcoming Sotheby's sale will have to be put on hold.
The sale in question is 'Magnificent Books, Manuscripts and Drawings from the Collection of Frederick 2nd Lord Hesketh'. Magnificent really is the right word, this collection includes a Shakespeare first folio (estimate £1m-£1.5m); various books from 'the dawn of printing' including an incunabulum (goodness, don't get to use that word very often) printed by William Caxton sometime in 1482 (estimate a mere £40k-£60k); and, most magnificent of all from my point-of-view, a first edition of Audubon's Birds of America (likely price is an eye-watering £4m-£6m).
The bird book, in four volumes, is a huge format that's pretty much 3ft by 2ft in size - a double-elephant folio - I don't think I've ever seen such a thing before. The first templates for it, of about 10 plates, were printed by William Lizars in Edinburgh, with the remaining 420-odd produced by Robert Havell & Son in London.
So I for one will be hot-footing it over to Sotheby's to see the exhibition of these works that precedes the sale itself, which takes place a week on Tuesday.
Who knows, I might bump into a print millionaire or two sizing up a title or two for their collections? One might imagine that Lord Gavron would find shelf space for a little something.
Sigh. I suppose there's always a chance that my numbers could come up this coming weekend... but perhaps a more realistic ambition will be cobbling together the £30 required for a catalogue.
