Auction of rare collectable items at Laurel Park
MULLEN’S of Laurel Park in Bray are holding an auction of historical and collectable memorabilia, taking place on Saturday, October 31 at 11 a.m.
A gold medal award presented to John McCormack in 1925 by the American Radio Exposition Company for winning ‘Broadcast Favourite’ is estimated at €2,000-€3,000.
McCormack was the most famous Irish voice in the World. He sang love songs to lonely shop-girls in their New York boarding houses and sang to soldiers in the trenches about their mothers.
His career spanned opera houses to Hollywood’s first talkies. He even appeared in Technicolour as himself at a party in Wings of the Morning (1937).
But it was radio that made McCormack’s career. His charisma floated from the wireless and the listeners loved him.
A reproduction of the Book of Kells is in the catalogue, with an estimated value of €5,000 to €7,000.
It would take seven years to view the entire Book of Kells at Trinity, with a page turned weekly.
In 1986 Trinity College Library and specialist facsimile publisher Faksimile Verlag, Lucerne, Switzerland began a four year collaboration to produce the first complete colour facsimile of the manuscript.
The challenges were many, not least access to the most protected manuscript the firm had ever encountered and the fact that the printers had never come across some of the colours used in its illumination.
Using a custom-designed photographic process, each page was photographed and reproduced with Verlag’s purpose built printing process. The result was a faithful reproduction all 680 pages of the manuscript bound in fine white leather over wooden boards and accompanied by a scientific commentary edited by Peter Fox, Trinity College librarian and archivist.
In 1990 the price for one of the 1,480 copies produced was IR£7,000 (€8,888). Pricey, but it was the first time since it entered the safe keeping of Trinity College Library in 1661 that someone could leaf through the book that is regarded as Ireland’s greatest contribution to World culture.
A bronze death mask of James Joyce is estimated to fetch €1,500 to €2,000.
In the early hours of January 13, 1941, James Joyce died in a Zurich hospital. His wife Nora authorised a local sculptor Paul Speck to make two plaster death masks.
Unbeknownst to Nora, Speck made a third cast, which he kept for himself. This mask is now in the United States Library of Congress.
Before parting with his mask Speck made six more plaster replicas. One of these found its way into the hands of Dublin architect, Michael Scott, who established the James Joyce Tower at Sandycove.
Some time in the late 1950s or 60s, Scott used his plaster mask to make six bronzes of the death mask.
He gave one of these to John Huston, the film director who made Joyce’s short story ‘ The Dead’ into a 1987 film of the same name, starring his daughter Angelica.
In 2017 John Huston’s mask was used by the Birmingham foundry Lunt’s Castings to produce an edition of twelve bronze death masks.
One of these bronze masks is on offer in Mullen’s forthcoming Collector’s Cabinet auction, mounted on a Kilkenny marble plinth, and engraved ‘James Joyce – 1882-1941’. Other items in the collection include Kathleen Clarke’s medals, and a collection of football programmes,
Viewing at the Laurel salerooms, Woodbrook, Bray, will be from Wednesday, October 28 until Friday, October 30, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.