Auctions | September 1, 2014

AntiquarianAuctions.com Announces Recent Highlights

Auction #37 was successfully concluded on 28th August 2014 with particularly brisk bidding. Although a South African operation set up in 2010, over 50% of the site’s users are now based in the UK, the US and the rest of the world. 

Antiquarianauctions.com is an online auction site dedicated to the sale of rare books, maps & prints, documents, letters, ephemera and vintage photography. Only recognised booksellers are permitted to sell on the site. 

At auction #37, over 40% of the sales went to international clients from 14 countries in total.

Booksellers wishing to sell on Antiquarian Auctions' monthly sales should contact: support@antiquarianauctions.com

Auctions are held every five weeks and run on the model of a timed auction for one week. A preview of the auction will appear on the homepage two weeks before the auction begins. All pricing is done in US$.

Next auction dates:

Auction #38 9-16 October 2014

Auction #39 20-27 November 2014

No buyer’s premium is charged.

Auction #37 highlights:

ORIGINAL WATERCOLOUR PAINTING OF FLOWERS, Roupell (Arabella)

Hammer price: $2500

Description: With another fragment salvaged from the ‘D’Urban’ album.

1. Watercolour painting depicting a display of flowers including Geranium sp. possibly Grobertianum (English geranium),Crotalaria and Parochetus africanus. Painted on card with signs on the back of having been removed from an album. 275 x 222 mm. Undated and probably painted after her return from the Cape in 1844.

2. Scrap of a watercolour depicting a Heliophilia coronopifolia from Namaqualand and the Western Cape. Mounted on a leaf from an artist’s sketch pad. 185 x 100 mm. Undated but probably from her period at the Cape, 1843/4.

THE BOER SIDE OF THE WHITE FLAG, CRUELTY, ETC. (Unpublished manuscript), MacQueen (Peter) by Peter MacQueen, Boston, Mass., U.S.A., Sept.1900

Hammer Price: $2,730

Peter MacQueen (1865-1924) was born in Scotland and left for the United States when he was 17 years old. He graduated from Princeton University in 1887 and from Union Theological Seminary in 1890. His first church was in New York. He moved to Boston in 1892. In1898, he became a war correspondent and went to Cuba with Theodore Roosevelt. He travelled to the Transvaal in 1900 to cover the guerrilla war. After that, MacQueen travelled extensively throughout Russia, Japan, the Philippines and Africa. He wrote about and gave lectures on his experiences. This manuscript contains wide ranging accounts, many of them first hand, of Boer grievances, British atrocities and numerous ‘white flag’ events. He reports on claims by the Boers that ‘attempts have been made by the English authorities to bribe their generals, de la Rey, de Wet and Louis Botha. De la Rey told me he had been offered ten thousand pounds a year if he would surrender.’

He includes an interview with General Louis Botha in which he describes attempts by Kitchener and Roberts dissuade him from his cause. MacQueen concludes, ‘I saw much in my travels through South Africa to substantiate the opinion that the English leaders there, as Mr Cecil J. Rhodes has perhaps unwisely said, are taking every little coign of vantage they can get to cover their inherent weakness and military ineptitude. The large number of dead men they report as “missing” shows that they are afraid to look the facts in the face. The men are also getting beyond control of the officers.’