Miniature Books: The Stephen and Sandra Joffe Collection

By Rupert Neelands and Stephen Joffe

This catalogue gives detailed description of 220 miniature books divided into eight sections located in the library of Dunderave Castle in Scotland.

The three major sections include Rare Books, Almanacs and Thumb Bibles followed by five minor sections which include Prayer Books, the Koran with other works from 18th, 19th Centuries, post 1900 and Objets d’Art.

The collection at Dunderave Castle consists of two collections purchased at auction. The initial was from the Dutch book dealer Nico Israel and his wife Nanni collected over their lifetime from important collections such as the Houghton sale in 1979 and include the earliest published miniature the Kalendarium of 1570 by Plantin.

The other titles purchased from Mr. and Mrs. John Gutfreund from New York included several books from the Salomon collection.

Following the introduction, a detailed description is given of the books with photographic images taken by Iain McLean and John Linton.

Miniature books are defined as 3 inches (77cm) or less in height but for books printed in 19th Century or earlier it can be extended to 4 inches.

The Israel collection was housed in a Miniature revolving bookcase, a bureau cabinet and a pedestal bookcase.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665548373

Rupert Neelands

Stephen N. Joffe, BSc, MBBCh, MD, FACS, FCS(SA), FSA(Scot), FACG, FRCS(Edinburgh), FRCS(Glasgow) Stephen is an Esteemed Quondam Professor of Surgery at University of Cincinnati Medical Center, a position he has held since 1990 and previously from 1980 he was a full-time Professor of Surgery and Medicine and Divisional Director of Gastro-Intestinal and Endocrine Surgery. Stephen has held faculty appointments at the Universities of London and Glasgow and holds fellowships of the American college of Surgeons, the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of Edinburgh and Glasgow and the South African College of Surgeons. He is a member or fellow, past and current of over 80 societies, has published nearly 200 articles in peer reviewed and scientific journals and 40 chapters for books, including being author and editor of nine books on lasers and their application to medicine and surgery, and two books on the anatomist, Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) and is a rare book collector of the early anatomists. He was Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of LCA-Vision, Inc. Nasdaq:LCAV. He was also the found of the Company’s corporate predecessor, Laser Centers of America, Inc. and served as its Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer and founder and Chairman of SLT(Japan) Co.,Ltd. He is presently a Visiting Professor in History of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai, Los Angeles (2018-2023), the Chief Executive Officer of the Joffe Foundation, a non-profit charity and Co-Chairman of Joffe MediCenter, LLC, a healthcare services company, a past Board member of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a past Board member of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Rupert Neelands was born in Doncaster, Yorkshire in 1948. He studied English Literature at Bristol University and Queen Mary London, and taught English for two years at the British Institute in Oporto. Having married in Portugal, he joined Christie’s South Kensington in 1983, training as a book specialist. He intended to stay for only a few months but found the work so different to teaching that he continued at Christie’s until 2016, becoming an auctioneer and director, taking in books of every conceivable type for sale. Early printing, science and medicine, natural history and foreign travel were all big subjects in those days. However, Rupert also had a liking for seemingly trivial books connected with social life, chess, cricket, angling, and not least the miniature books so often serving as gifts to children or lovers. Rupert now works freelance and for the fine art valuers, Doerr Dallas.

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© 2022 Rupert Neelands Stephen Joffe. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-6655-4838-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-4837-3 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-5068-0 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022900298

Published by AuthorHouse 01/26/2022

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CONTENTS

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Introduction

Catalogue of Miniature Book Collection

Valuation And Grading System

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

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Interior of Library at Dunderave Castle,

designed by Sir Robert Lorimer (1864-1929)

INTRODUCTION

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The Stephen and Sandra Joffe Collection of Miniature Books

By Rupert Neelands

The ‘Israel sale’, held by Christie’s on 11 December 2019, was a sale of cartographical treasures, the former property of the Dutch book dealer, Nico Israel. While Nico had died in 2002, his wife Nanni had lived on to a great age. Flipping through the distinguished if relatively slim catalogue a day or two before the named auction, I was intrigued to find that a collection of miniature books, also included in it, had been expressly formed by Nico for his wife. As a former Christie’s specialist, I had slightly mixed feelings about the collections of miniatures which occasionally came to us for sale. One’s eyesight and clumsy fingers could be seriously challenged by tiny pages of microscopic type. Yet how irresistible it always was to prize open such little books and discover the contents.

Felix de Marez Oyens, a close friend to Nico and Nanni, had written the catalogue introduction relating how, in keeping with other treasures, the miniatures had long been hidden away in the Israels’ Amsterdam apartment, in the Apollolaan. Until such time as Lord Wardington, a family friend and esteemed map collector, provided a miniature revolving boxwood bookcase for the display of at least some of them, they lay in the ignominious concealment of a box. Now their sale was taking place in three lots. In the viewing room Blaeu’s town atlases of the Netherlands and Robert Dudley’s great sea atlas, Arcano del mare, were among the heavy folios which seemed to frown across at the Lilliputian forces under glass. However, as I was to discover, there was every reason to take them seriously. ‘Israel’ was listed among the buyers at the sale of Arthur A. Houghton’s miniatures at Christie’s London in 1979. Ruth Adomeit, the American bibliographer and miniature book collector extraordinary, cites rare items from the Israel collection in Three Centuries of Thumb Bibles (1980).

Two of the miniature volumes enjoyed the status of separate lots. Lot 4 was Christophe Plantin’s Kalendarium (Antwerp, 1570). Printed in red and black in gothic characters, it measured just 33 x 20mm. Nico Israel had paid 8500 francs for it in the Esmerian sale, part 1, held in Paris, 6 June 1972. One had to admire the sober binding of contemporary black goatskin with chased and filigree silver clasps. What’s more, the date 1570 was the earliest known for a miniature book printed by Plantin, and it now carried an estimate of £8000-12,000.

Lot 5, Prières ecclesiastiques, printed by François Perrin in Geneva in 1566, was even earlier in date and almost as minute. Estimated at £2000-3000, it lacked a text leaf but possessed a highly unusual backless embroidered binding, resembling the body of a stringed instrument. Sensibly, both rare volumes were reproduced actual size in the catalogue.

Every other miniature from the Israel collection was included in lot 16, summarised as ‘Miniature Books, a large collection of 214 volumes, dating from the 17th to 20th century’. The estimate was £20,000-30,000 or roughly £100 per volume at the low estimate. As the catalogue illustration revealed, most of the volumes were housed in five miniature bookcases, one of which was Lord Wardington’s birthday gift to Nanni. To offer the whole shooting match in one lot helped the auctioneers to keep lot values high; it also meant that there was a chance of the collection remaining more or less unbroken.

The auction of Percy Spielmann’s collection in 1964 had set a precedent for selling this way. His collection was housed in nine miniature bookcases, containing as many as 848 volumes all told. The number of almanacs alone was 186. Sotheby’s New York offered the collection as a single lot in their sale of 21 July 1964, providing a laudably detailed description. Julian I. Edison bought the lot for $22,960, an average of $27 per volume (equivalent to $228 per volume in today’s values).

In contrast, little was revealed about lot 16 beyond the fact that it was multi-faceted, containing ‘histories … works of scripture, devotion, literature, almanacs, and natural history’. Three 17th century miniatures were alluded to, and these were certainly important, ‘a Dutch song book from 1650 preserved in a charming contemporary vellum wallet binding’, a French book of hours dated 1684, and ‘an English bible in contemporary morocco from 1693’. The general appeal of the bindings was emphasised, and even extended to morocco boxes fitted with a little almanac and magnifying glass to read it with. Last but not least, there was mention of a ‘19th-century miniature Parisian edition of Paul et Virginie’ in proof sheets. It made you wonder, what else was in the collection of the sage bookseller?

I had no chance to do serious viewing, let alone attend the sale, but the results were rousing. The miniatures punched way above their weight. Lot 4, Plantin’s Kalendarium of 1570, made £13,750. Lot 5, the Prières ecclesiastiques, reached the totally unexpected heights of £10,625. Lot 16 practically doubled its top estimate to sell for £56,250, or about £280 per volume (figures include auctioneer’s premium). I shoved my catalogue back on the shelf, happy to make this a sale to remember, rueful about my poor knowledge of lot 16.

About eight months later, at the beginning of August 2020, with the Covid pandemic drastically affecting so many lives, I received a call from my old firm. This was to tell me that Stephen Joffe, who had successfully bid on the telephone for lots 4 and 16, was looking for a qualified person to make an inventory of titles. ‘Would you be able to do it?’ was the coaxing interrogative of Meg Ford, Head of the Book Department.

‘Give me time to think it over’ was my invariable response to such invitations, but in this case I knew I was going to agree. The feats of miniaturisation show great craftsmanship, and this was an extraordinary, undreamt-of opportunity to complete my viewing of lot 16. The only drawback was the pandemic and the distance I had to travel to see the little volumes again. I learned from Meg that they were now located in Dunderave Castle, the Joffe’s second home on the west coast of Argyll. She described it as isolated spot free from much chance of infection. However, it was seven or eight hours of travel from my home in west London; to journey there and back would inevitably involve a health risk.

As I subsequently learned, the first person to see the books once they had been shipped to Scotland was Gabrielle Fox Butler, an experienced bookbinder and conservationist, regularly employed by Stephen. It was in late February 2020 that she took on the task of unpacking ‘an uninventoried lot with the excitement of discoveries to be made’. One such discovery was ‘finding an envelope in the drawer of a miniature bookcase addressed to Nanni in Amsterdam and posted from West Indies Field, Little Deer Island’. Inside she found ‘correspondence from Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) and dozens of tiny 15 x 18mm. bookplates with Nanni’s initials, exquisitely printed in three colours’.

As my time in Dunderave would be just a few days, I had the idea of writing up a skeletal version of the inventory in advance of my visit. Christie’s passed on a photo-file which contained scores of images (‘j-pegs’), showing first the binding and then the title-page of each volume. At a far earlier date someone — I guessed it was Nanni — had written down references from Doris Welsh’s Bibliography of