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Modern first editions

When Bertram Rota founded this company in 1923 it was in order to specialise in Modern First Editions, a field of book collecting that he pioneered, encouraged, developed and sustained virtually single-handed at that time and the one that has remained the central plank of the business that bears his name today. He set high standards of bibliographic research, expertise, accurate description and fair pricing in his early, ground-breaking catalogues and these standards have been maintained in over 300 catalogues that have followed.

In the past eighty years we have been privileged to have pass through our hands the First Editions of the majority of the creative writers in the English language working from the late nineteenth century to the present day and ranging from items of the utmost rarity to the most commonplace. We have been instrumental in helping to form very many collections, large and small, private and institutional, throughout the world and to the precise requirements of our clients in their particular areas of interest.

Our accumulated expertise and unrivalled knowledge of the field of Modern First editions is, as it has always been, freely available today to all collectors who care to enquire.

Book of the month:

LIGHTOLLER (COMMANDER C.H.) Titanic and other Ships
  

Portrait frontispiece. Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1935. First Edition. Original black cloth, lettered in gilt on spine and in blind on upper cover. An exceptional nice copy in dust-wrapper that is substantially complete but has suffered extensive tears and creases, some of which are internally tape-repaired, with some loss to head and foot of spine panel and at head of upper and lower panels, including some areas of lettering. Inscribed by the Author on the front free end-paper to a fellow-officer survivor of the sinking of the Titanic ‘Herbert J. Pitman To my old shipmate and companion survivor C.H. Lightoller’. There are some slight pencilled marginal annotations in the chapter dealing with the rescue of the the Titanic‘s survivors, probably in the hand of Pitman. An outstanding and poignant Association Copy of what is in any event an extremely scarce book and doubly so in its dust-wrapper, regardless of its condition. Lightoller was not only the most senior officer to survive the sinking but also the last survivor to be rescued. It is particularly interesting to note that on the dust-wrapper Lightoller is described as ιThe only surviving officer᾿, a statement which almost certainly flows from a misreading of passages in Lightollerιs text and which also gives rise to the pencilled annotations mentioned above.

  
  

£4000