Uh… WOW. Just… wow. You see incredible stuff coming up for auction every single day on eBay, of course, but this is something extra, extra special: twelve drawings—twelve really good ones, too—in a sketchbook by the “divine draftsman” of the occult, British artist Austin Osman Spare, a contemporary and ‘frenemy’ of Aleister Crowley.

From the eBay listing:

Executed between April and May 1925, ‘A Book of Automatic Drawings’ is Spares most highly finished early sketchbook. Created in what was a particularly dark and turbulent period of his life, the books comprises twelve full page drawings and four pages of calligraphic titles, signatures and other devices.

Originally produced for publication, but due to the high costs of printing and the failure of his magazine ‘The Golden Hind’ it was sold unpublished to Spare’s great patron Pickford Waller. After his death in 1930 the sketchbook passed to his daughter Sybil. The book remained in her collection until the late 1960s, when it was then placed in auction. The book then reappeared in the early 1970s in a Hammersmith Gallery where it was then purchased jointly by Roy Curtis-Bramwell and Ian Kenyur-Hodgkins. Together they arranged a reproduction of the work (which unfortunately never did the sketchbook much justice), where the book went next is unknown, but it was purchased by a private collector in the early 1980s and remained in his collection.

Three days left on the auction.
 

 

 

 
Thank you kindly, Alex Burns!