Christie’s London Books and Manuscripts Sale Sets a Record

Christie’s realized £12,707,879 at its Valuable Books and Manuscripts, Including Cartography sale at King Street in London on July 8, 2026 — per the auction house, the most valuable various-owner Books and Manuscripts sale ever held in the city. The medieval lots did much of the work, led by a manuscript of King Arthur.

The volume known as Re Artù, a late thirteenth-century illuminated manuscript of Arthurian romance containing the Estoire de Merlin, sold for £2,246,000 against an estimate of £1.5–2 million. It had been in private hands for roughly seven hundred years and had never been publicly exhibited before this season’s previews, as The Guardian (May 26, 2026) and CNN (May 28, 2026) reported ahead of the sale.

The result crowned a London book season in which Sotheby’s ran its “Book Week” from June 23 to July 7, 2026, per its series page. Sotheby’s has separately described 2025 as a record year for its own Books and Manuscripts department, with an aggregate near $82 million, per its department site — a sign that the market for medieval and early modern text is holding even as the contemporary segment cools.

A various-owner record measures something a single-owner collection cannot. Single-owner sales ride one library’s taste and one estate’s timing; a various-owner evening needs consignments from many shelves at once. A total of £12.7 million assembled from dispersed owners — private libraries surfacing after decades, dealers reallocating stock — says the depth is real rather than borrowed.

For the Arthurian manuscript, the price confirms a longer pattern: chivalric romances with long, quiet provenance now sell to institutions and private foundations as history rather than as literature’s poor relation. Seven hundred years in one family’s keeping, then a London auction room — provenance of that continuity is itself the rarity on the block.