Fred Hanna's rare books fetch €350,000 at auction

THE OLD Berkeley Court Hotel in Ballsbridge, a former watering-hole of the Tiger-era’s big-beast developers, yesterday hosted a rather more genteel gathering – of rare book collectors.

In a temporary saleroom at the now D4 Berkeley Hotel, Mealy’s fine art auctioneers sold the late Fred Hanna’s private collection of antiquarian rare books, modern first editions, maps and manuscripts.

Mr Hanna, who died last month, was one of Ireland’s best-known booksellers and collectors. The auction-goers were mostly bespectacled, silver-haired, smartly dressed, well-heeled and male.

Auctioneer George F Mealy whizzed briskly through the 650 lots at the rate of about 100 miles an hour. He provoked laughter in the packed saleroom when he announced that lot 51, a volume of saucy Edwardian erotica, was "well-illustrated". Bidders were invited to "wink" instead of raising a hand, and Memoirs of Fanny Hill, A Woman of Pleasureduly sold for €380.

Buyers were happy to chat but did not wish to be named. A man who paid €1,000 for Patrick Kavanagh's first book, Ploughman and other Poems, said: "Book collectors are quiet types, unlike some ostentatious art collectors who tend to be flashier".

A Dublin man who successfully bid €8,250 for a first edition of James Joyce's Ulyssesconfided that he had been trying to buy a copy for 30 years.

The priciest item was a set of broadsides published between 1908 and 1915 by the Dun Emer Press in Dundrum and illustrated by Jack B Yeats, at €12,000.

The sale realised a total of €350,000 and Mealy’s afterwards declared the market for rare books to be “very buoyant”.

The sale lots covered a very broad range of subjects, reflecting Mr Hanna’s spectrum of interests.

There was very intense bidding for a signed first edition of Flann O'Brien's 1939 novel, At Swim-Two-Birds,which eventually sold for €3,400 – four times its estimate.