The earliest rules of club football made £881,250.
The earliest surviving manuscript for a novel by Jane Austen – The Watsons – tripled its pre-sale estimate to make £993,250 at Sotheby’s in London on July 14. Reckoned to be the most important Jane Austen item to come to market in over 20 years it was sold to a bidder in the room on behalf of an institution.
The earliest rules of club football – sold as part of an archive of the world’s oldest football club, Sheffield – made £881,250. This is an auction record for any item of football memorabilia.
There was a record for the sale at auction any edition of any of the Brontë novels for a rare first edition of Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, which made £241,250; James Joyce’s wartime family passport made £61,250 and a script for the first episode of the world’s longest-running radio drama, Radio 4’s The Archers made £6,875.
See antiquesandartireland.com posts for May 1 and May 23.