From junk shop to saleroom for folio of book illustrations

An incredibly rare folio of what have been described as being amongst the finest book illustrations of all time is to go under the hammer in Messingham after being entered in an auction by a lady who found it in a junk shop half a century ago.

- By KAT LISTER

The folio of sixteen illustrations of subjects from Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book was commissioned in 1903 by the publishers Macmillan from the brilliant artistic twins Maurice and Edward Detmold, young prodigies who had been exhibiting at the Royal Academy and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours since the age of 13.

Just 500 of the 16 x 20 inch cased folios were produced and that was not only for Britain but for America too. Many of those folios have been broken up and the prints framed individually in the past 122 years, making complete survivors even more rare.

And if that were not enough the example that will go under the hammer in the June auction at The Old School in Messingham is even more interesting. A bookplate tells us that it was once in the library of baronet Sir George White (1854-1916), a millionaire Bristol businessman and philanthropist, the man who owned the city's tramways company and opened Britain's first aircraft factory in Bristol in 1910.