Catalogue 114 – Art & Design is now available from Ken Spelman Books Ltd. The list contains acquisitions of rare books from the 18th century onwards.

Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England is available for £320.00. The work is a fourth edition and is presented in five volumes. As is noted in the catalogue the work has incidental notes on other arts and these were collected by Mr. George Vertue which Walpole published from the original manuscripts. Although Vertue published several volumes on various artistic subjects during his lifetime, the text within Anecdotes was not seen in print until after his death.

A treatise bound in the original blind stamped green cloth with gilt title lettering enclosed by a floral wreath on the upper cover entitled The Art of Flower Painting, in easy lessons; with directions for preparing the tints, and examples of each subject in vari ousstages, drawn and coloured from nature by James Andrews is available priced at £850.00. Andrews writes: “In compliance with the wishes of my numerous pupils and patrons, I have been induced to publish a new and improved series of my Lessons in Flower Painting. In this work I have introduced the use of Indian ink instead of the neutral tint for laying down the first shadows... I have likewise endeavoured to give more variety, and to increase the utility of the work by a new and choice selection of examples.”

Translated from French by John Spanton is M. E. Chevruel’s work, The Laws of Contrast of Colour; and their application to the arts of painting, decoration of buildings, mosaic work, tapestry and carpet weaving, calico printing, dress, paper staining, printing, illumination, landscape, and flower gardening, &c. Originally printed in colour in 1859 in two separate editions - this one, with coloured plates by Edmund Evans, which have ten or more colours and are said to rival the best chromolithography. This work established Evans as London’s foremost commercial printer and engraver of his time. The work is for sale at £495.00.

Advertised at £295 is Ralph Wedgwood’s ‘Patent Manifold Writer’. This was used for copying letters, invoices, despatches, etc., either in duplicate or triplicate. This has the original metal plate. The item lacks the stylus, and the book of carbonic-ink paper. However, contained within the original black morocco folder are instructions printed on glazed green paper on the inner cover, and the large title label on similar paper on the inner rear cover. Circa 1806 Wedgwood had patented a crude form of carbon paper. The Wedgwood Patent Manifold Writer was patented in 1806 and initially intended as a means of helping blind people to write. But it was very quickly adapted for business use, and similar systems that were sold from 1806 until around the end of the 19th century enabled users to retain a copy of outgoing letters made with this carbon paper. Mark Twain wrote some of his stories on Manifold Writers in the early 1870s.