World record as "bird-book" sells for £7m

A rare 19th century bird book has fetched over £7.3 million at auction – a world record price for a printed book. The four volumes of John James Audubon's Birds Of America were bought by renowned London book dealer Michael Tollemache.

Mr Tollemache described the bird watcher’s guide as “priceless” after seeing off rival bidders in the crowded Sotheby’s saleroom in London. He forked out £7,321,250 – more than the tome’s pre-sale estimate of between £4 million and £6 million.

The book, a huge digest of birds painted to life-size, was part of the literary collection of the late Frederick Fermor-Hesketh, the 2nd Baron Hesketh. The 50 lots comprising his collection fetched almost £15 million in all with the 1623 first collected edition of 36 Shakespeare plays going for £1,497,250.

Widely regarded as the most important work in all English literature, the 'First Folio' includes Macbeth, The Tempest and Twelfth Night.

The Birds of America was issued in four volumes from 1827 to 1838. The book contains 1,000 illustrations of about 500 breeds of birds and took Audubon 12 years to complete.

The prints measure more than three feet by two feet with Audubon saying a small book was “all very well with weed warblers but when you come to bald eagles you're going to need a big book”.

It first captured the world's attention a decade ago, when another copy sold at auction for £5.7million. Only 119 copies of Haiti-born Audubon's book are known to survive with just a handful owned privately.

Skilled artist Audubon stalked his prey across America and shot them before hanging them from wire and painting them.

The spectacularly colourful and detailed result was printed and bound in 'double elephant' style with huge foldout pages. It was so widely regarded in his day that it was mentioned in Charles Darwin's On The Origin Of Species.

Audubon was born in 1785 on the turbulent Caribbean island of Haiti as the illegitimate son of a French sea captain and his mistress.

He lived through revolution, bankruptcy and rejection before achieving world-wide fame for his masterpiece on New World ornithology. He grew up in France before emigrating to the newly-formed United States of America in 1803, quickly making his way to the wild heart of the continent in Kentucky.

Without any experience of painting, the explorer decided to draw his new home country's vast array of colourful bird life and - equipped with paints and a gun - headed south down the great Mississippi river to begin his work.

He said later of his quirky adventure in the name of art: “I took up my gun, my notebook and my pencils and went forth to the woods.”

Audubon died in 1851.

Frederick Fermor-Hesketh went on a splurge of collecting top-end books in the early 1950s before dying in 1955 aged 39.

The trustees of his will were today selling his books, manuscripts and letters 55 years after his death. Other highlights from the collection included a letter from Queen Elizabeth I criticising the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots.

It went under the hammer for £349,250 – well above its pre-sale estimate of £150,000 to £200,000.


/Telegraph.co.uk/