Rich and rare collection in D4

There are big names and a wonderfully eclectic collection of books, maps and manuscripts in Mealy’s D4 sale next week

BECKETT, Heaney, Joyce, O’Casey, Wilde, Yeats. All the big names – and many more besides – feature in next week’s fascinating sale by Mealy’s of rare books, periodicals, maps and manuscripts.

Viewing begins tomorrow afternoon at the D4 Berkeley Hotel in Ballsbridge where the sale starts on Tuesday at 10.15am.

The beautifully illustrated – and eminently browseable catalogue (€20) – would delight any book lover and make a perfectly acceptable Christmas gift in its own right.

The headline items include first editions by James Joyce including one of the few known copies of his earliest surviving published work, a 96-line poem, The Holy Office(€15,000-€20,000). A copy of a first edition of Ulysses– one of the legendary first issue of 1,000 copies published in 1922 by Shakespeare Co, Paris – has undergone some restoration which explains the modest estimate of €7,000-€10,000. A copy of the first edition of Dubliners is €2,000-€3,000.

A collection of eight unrecorded letters by the playwright Seán O’Casey, written from Devon where he lived during the Second World War, has an estimate of €3,000-€4,000. In one, he recalls his early life in Dublin where he “became an out-of-door labourer helping at building, drainage and so on, all the time buying a book now and again out of what I could spare”.

A cache of correspondence between the writer Brian O'Nolan and his agent and publishers is expected to fetch between €10,000 and €15,000. O'Nolan, a Co Tyrone-born civil servant who died in 1966, was also a novelist and satirist who wrote under various pseudonyms. As Flann O'Brien he wrote novels including At Swim-Two-Birdsand The Third Policemanand as Myles na gCopaleen was best known for a satirical column, Cruiskeen Lawn, in The Irish Times.The letters reveal that O'Nolan had issues with the tax authorities and "wrote a letter of unsurpassed violence to the Chairman of our Revenue Commissioners demanding to know why I should be subjected to penal double taxation as a result of the culpable delinquency of the Commissioners down the years".

WB Yeats features several times in the original Visitor’s Book from the offices of the publisher Cuala Press. The purple leather notebook (€8,000-€1,200) contains 1,900 signatures of “almost everyone active in Irish or Anglo-Irish cultural affairs between 1908 and 1928”.

The writer Brendan Behan wasn’t very impressed by Hollywood during a visit to America in 1961. He described it, in a letter home, as “not much of place – like Foxrock multiplied by a hundred – but my sort of people and bags of money lying round for a hard-working boy like me”.

The letter is part of collection of papers relating to The Quare Fellow guiding €1,000-€1,500.

This is a wonderfully eclectic sale which will appeal to the widest possible audience, with over 900 lots ranging from a book on angling personally owned and signed by the infamous Capt. Charles Cunningham Boycott (€600-€900) to an unexpectedly topical pamphlet from 1807, T he Fallen Angels! A Brief Review of the Measures of the Late Administration(€150-€200) which might make a suitable festive gift for a politician or regulator.