Far From the Madding Crowd

This index is compiled from the sales reports published in every issue of The Book Collector. These reports have themselves been assembled principally from eye-witness accounts by our correspondents. It is therefore a record of context as much as of cost. Who was bidding against whom, what was sold afterwards, the cataloguing errors, extraordinary provenances, rarity considered objectively - so on and suchlike. Some account of this system can be found in The Price of Passion ( 2016-04).

Entries are differentiated between Author, Title, Subject and Collection. It should be noted, however, that in the case of most classical texts and many cartographers, the author is also the title.