Catalogue Three

This list of 30-something items has been put together from our recent acquisitions.

The catalogue starts with a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible and ends with a set of notes produced by the Ferranti Computer Department explaining how to programme one of the earliest commercially available computers. Five hundred years divide them but both represent a revolution in how human beings communicate with each other.

Bookended by Gutenberg and the computer are the rarest issue of William Blake's Book of Job, the first large folio edition of the Geneva Bible from 1578 and the earliest published picture of a potato in Gerarde's Herball of 1597. But this catalogue is not just about revolutions in printing. Among the manuscripts are an exquisite late fifteenth-century Book of Hours, a letter from Cardinal Pole to the Pope's office written during a fraught episode of the Reformation, two volumes of an unpublished political history of Europe written by a future Speaker of the House of Commons, and a letter from Twinkletoes.

We are also selling the Aston Martin DB6 (see opposite). Our plan was to have a car with a literary connection and an Aston Martin seemed the perfect choice. We contacted the classic car dealer James Henderson (www. greensidecars.com) who brought this along to Voewood for the photoshoot. We mentioned the bookish link with James Bond to which he replied "James Bond drove a DB5 ... but don't worry, the DB6 is better than a DB5".

So, there you are: "even better than James Bond's car".