This sale features first editions, presentation copies, letters and manuscripts, from the mid-sixteenth century to the present day.

An exceptional highlight is an unpublished manuscript by Charlotte Brontë, written in miniature script when she was aged just fourteen.

The sale also includes, from a separate source, a series of presentation copies of the works of the Brontë sisters, given to their close friend Ellen Nussey.

Also in the sale are the second folio edition (1632) of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, first and inscribed editions of the works of Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde and Graham Greene, a very rare item of seventeenth-century postal history, family copies of works by Darwin, manuscripts of Karl Popper, and an E.H. Shepard original illustration of Piglet.

The sale also includes manuscripts of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz.