I have been thinking about Conan Doyle this week and the failure at auction of a fine first signed presentation of A Study in Scarlet. It was bought in at £250,000. Possibly the Sangorski rebind was a good excuse not to buy it, a limpid wraps copy inscribed would surely sell. Possibly a warmer inscription or a presentation to a fellow explorer of the spiritual realms-someone like Madam Blavatsky or the boy avatar Krishnamurti would have carried it over the finishing line. The inscription read - "This is the very first | independent book of | mine which ever was | published | Arthur Conan Doyle. | Jan 9 / 14".

There must be several thousand Sherlockian punters worldwide but sadly (for the seller) not one of them with a few hundred grand to spare for the great 1887 Beeton's Christmas Annual. One dealer I met took it as a portent--he also cited a lacklustre Churchill sale and major botanical books that were making less now than in the early 1990s without even building in inflation. 'Prices are dropping like stones' he mused. All is not lost, price changes can often be explained by shifts in taste and one can see new auction records being broken almost weekly in the field of fine modern first editions in fine jackets or with great inscriptions. Follow the money --as the swindler might say.

My favourite Sherlock story is Charles Augustus Milverton. Holmes, master of disguise, in pitted against the evil and resourceful Milverton - a pitiless blackmailer of noble women. Holmes disguises himself as a plumber and heads to Hampstead, where he courts Milverton's housemaid, even managing to become her fiancé. The character of Charles Augustus Milverton was based on a real blackmailer, Charles Augustus Howell, an art dealer who preyed upon an unknown number of people, including the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Not quite a literary swindler, although he may have trousered some of Ruskin's money. His biographer Helen Rossetti Angeli, could find no evidence to support accusations of blackmail. There is a fine Beerbohm watercolour of him eavesdropping at a door while his lover while Rosa Corder forges Rossetti drawings. He is said to have been involved in his friend Felice Orsini's attempt to assassinate Napoleon III in 1858 and to have persuaded Dante Gabriel Rossetti to dig up the poems he buried with his wife Elizabeth Siddal. His death was equally macabre -he was found close to a Chelsea public house with his throat slit, and a ten-shilling coin in his mouth. There is a suggestion he may have died elsewhere. The ten bob bid treatment was apparently reserved for those guilty of slander.

Ruskin, rich in his time, employed him as a secretary between 1865 and 1868. He trusted Howell with "affairs needing delicate handling and a wise discretion..." - mostly to manage his discreet charitable donations. Howell sought increasingly to obtain complete control of Ruskin's finances and Edward Burne-Jones persuaded him to sever his connection with Howell. Whistler thought he was a fine fellow, however, a "wonderful man...genius...splendidly flamboyant." [To be continued.]

Thanks once again to the Bookride for the article

I am travelling in the US at present, so a little detached from UK book releases. However, I see that Paul Harding’s first novel, Tinkers, has just been published in hardcover by Heinemann. In the last couple of years, Tinkers was the surprise success of US literary fiction, winning the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and being hailed as a masterpiece by many critics. It also had an unusual publishing history and has become very collectible, although the boat has been well and truly missed so far as the US editions are concerned.

Harding (born 1967) is a Boston-based author and musician (a drummer), who has taught writing at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. He grew up on the north shore of Boston in the town of Wenham, Massachusetts. As a youth he spent a lot of time "knocking about in the woods" which he attributes to his love of nature. His grandfather fixed clocks and he apprenticed under him, an experience that found its way into his novel Tinkers. After graduating from UMass, he spent time touring with his band in the US and Europe. He had always been a heavy reader and while in the middle of reading Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra he remembered putting it down and thinking "this is what I want to do". In When he next had time off from touring with the band he signed up for a summer writing class at Skidmore College in New York. By pure chance his teacher was Marilynne Robinson and through her he learned about the Iowa Writers' Workshop writing program and applied and was accepted. There he studied with Barry Unsworth, Elizabeth McCracken and later Marilynne Robinson. At some point he realized some of the people he admired most were "profoundly religious" and so he spent years reading theology, and was "deeply" influenced by Karl Barth and John Calvin. He considers himself a "self-taught modern New England transcendentalist".

I was intrigued by a chapter in Memoirs of Harriot, Duchess of St. Albans (Colburn 1839) headed 'Literary Swindlers.' In 1822 the former actress Harriot Mellon (1777 - 1837) had inherited over a billion pounds in today's money from her husband Thomas Coutts, the banker. She went on to marry the 9th Duke of St. Albans a man 20 years her junior. She left her vast fortune to Coutts's grand daughter the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts to whom she was very close. Harriot's fortune made her a target for a species of literary swindler who probably still exists today in some form. Harriot had lead a colourful life and there were many rumours about her origins and her career so writers were able to concoct 'a shameless mass of falsehoods' about her. As Mrs Baron-Wilson, author of these memoirs, puts it 'Mrs. Coutts being regarded as a female Croesus...was assailed by the lowest order of literati.'

For the next few days I'm going to be out of the office so updates will be fairly minimal, if any. I've got a MIFI dongle for my iPad, but it isn't that great. I'll be fully back on Monday, but hopefully get the odd update before then. Simon.

Wow, this is just getting silly. A pint of an Indian cricketer's blood was mixed in with the paper pulp for an edition of a book from publishers Kraken Opus limited to 10 copies and selling for $75,000 a piece. The books have sold out. Taschen have been doing this for a while, it's a new trend in publishing ridiculously priced books in very limited numbers with the intention of creating a market for investors - and it's working. The WSJ has a more thorough piece here.

Well, the news is that one of the most important Arthur Conan Doyle collectibles didn't sell. I don't have any further information at this point other than it was either passed, withdrawn or just didn't sell. Here are some that did sell though:

• The E.H. Shepherd 'Us Two' sketch sold for £55,250 (est. £45,000-£55,000)
• Lot 200, an Arthur Rackham sketch sold for £9,000 (est. £9,000-£12,000)
• A US first of Jack London's The Call of the Wild in Dust Jacket sold for £3,750 (est. £3,000-£5,000)
• That set of 280 Folio Society Volumes fetched £3,375 (£3,000-£5,000)
• Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children signed sold for £2,000 (£1,500-£2,500)
• The Endo Shusaku Lot of Typescripts and letters was a surprise winner fetching £13,750 (est. £4,000-£6,000)
• Ray Bradbury's Asbestos Fahrenheit 451 fetched £4,000 (£2,500-£3,000) - not to be smug, but I did suggest here that this estimate was a wee bit low!
• The Queen Elizabeth I document sold for £15,000 (£6,000-£8,000)
• Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations sold for £61,250 (£30,000-£50,000)
• Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan sold for a whopping £17,500 (£3,500-£5,000)
• The Borges Manuscript entitled John Keats sold for £9,375 (£4,000-£6,000) - At least some Borges manuscripts are selling!

The Clifford Ashdown and the signed association copy of the Waste Land presumably didn't sell. And I'm intrigued to see what happened to the Conan Doyle.

Reading that Sotheby’s are to sell a wonderful private cookery library on 15 July reminded me of the time I interviewed the brilliant Swiss chef Anton Mossiman (below) at his plush Belgravia restaurant. I wanted to know more about his huge collection of cookery books and had asked him to bring to the interview some of his favourite volumes. I was not prepared for the treasures that he lay before me on the table. These included an edition dated 1507 of Der Kuchenmeister, the earliest cookery book ever printed, which was partly in Latin, partly in German.. He also showed me a first edition dated 1570 of one of the most attractive cookery books ever published--- the work of Bartolomeo Scappi, chef to Pope Pius V, which contains fascinating plates of cooking utensils. In all, Mosimann’s gastronomic library came to around 6,000 volumes, most of which he has placed at the service of the students on his training centre in Battersea.

Mosimann had been a dedicated collector since his training on the continent—where he had picked up early texts for a few francs--hence the European slant to his collection, and I suspect that the continent is still the place to look for very early cookery and medical texts. However, even on the continent, treasures like Scappi and Der Kuchenmeister are rarely to be found outside libraries, and in the unlikely event of copies turning up for sale, would fetch five figure sums. Most 16th century and seventeenth century cookery books in English are also expensive, with Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook (1660), which won praise from Elizabeth David and Frances Bissel, making more that £4,000 at auction a few years ago. Doubtless the demand from well heeled celebrity chefs has pushed up prices. For a collector with a more modest pocket the place to start is the early eighteenth century-- a time of peace and plenty when a burgeoning middle class loved to stage elaborate dinner parties.

Pricing for freshness

If your item is listed as being for sale for too long a couple of things may happen. Firstly, people may see the item as stale and not selling - there must be something wrong with it and more often than not they don't really re-examine it, they just dismiss it. This is especially true with eBay where fixed-price items can just sit on a watch list for months and months.

Secondly, buyers may start to question why nobody else has bought it. It will sell eventually, but, as mentioned previously, unless you have an outstanding cash flow you can't afford to price too high.