A set of delicately carved sculptures cut by hand from the pages of famous Scottish literary works have been sold at auction for more than £50,000, to fund a reading charity.
The five pieces were made by an Edinburgh-based artist who began placing her first book sculptures in public places in 2011, captivating the city’s literary world. She insisted on remaining anonymous, adding to the mystique.
She made the five sculptures sold in the auction – which include an elaborate multimedia work cut from JM Barrie’s Peter Pan and another from Whisky Galore, Compton Mackenzie’s tale about whisky-starved Hebridean islanders – for the Scottish Books Trust the following year.
The trust then placed them around the country, releasing a daily clue to lead searchers to each item’s location. Now, almost a decade later, the trust will be using the sale proceeds to fund its free book banks and reading initiatives for children in less well-off areas of Scotland.
In a week-long online auction hosted by the Edinburgh-based auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull, the five works raised £50,500 after a spate of last-minute bids.
Peter Pan, which had been originally placed in Barrie’s birthplace, Kirriemuir, fetched £12,000; Whisky Galore, found in 2012 in the lounge bar of the Am Politician on Eriskay – the island where the SS Politician carrying 22,000 cases of whisky ran aground in 1941, achieved £9,000.
A carving from the leaves of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island reached £13,000, the highest bid of the five. It depicts Long John Silver and a parrot on a treasure chest. It was secreted in the Scottish Seabird Centre in North Berwick.
A sculpture from Alasdair Gray’s Glasgow-based modern classic Lanark, featuring the author seated, achieved £9,000 and had been originally placed in Glasgow School of Art; a paper and wire sculpture of Robert Burns’ epic poem Tam o’ Shanter, which shows Tam riding his mare with the witch Nannie in pursuit, and had been placed in the Burns museum in his birthplace of Alloway, reached £10,000.
Marc Lambert, the book trust’s chief executive, said the charity was delighted with the sale price. “Thanks to the generous bids, we will be able to provide even more books to those who need them most, though food banks, local authorities and other partners, and deliver more of our life-changing work,” he said.
Ian Rankin, the Edinburgh-based crime writer whose novel Hide and Seek was used in the artist’s first series of pieces, knows the artist and said she preferred anonymity. “She doesn’t want recognition for this. For her I think it represents a lot of people’s love for Edinburgh and for reading. This is just a small token of that,” he said.
“They comprise a love story. It’s a story of one artist who really appreciates Edinburgh as a city of writers and a city of stories.”
• This article was amended on 3 February 2022 to include detail about the 2012 sculpture hunt based on clues.
