A room full of strange tails

The painter Robert Lenkiewicz, who died in 2002, had amassed thousands of volumes on philosophy, witchcraft, superstition and the occult, including a "death room" in which he kept the embalmed body of a former friend. By the time the Lyon & Turnbull team had finished cataloguing the books, they had unearthed a frog, two toads and a lizard.

A brief scan of the shelves awaiting the Lyon & Turnbull sale gives a snapshot of Lenkiewicz's unusual interests: The History of Corporal Punishment, Head or The Art of Phrenology, Polidori's The Vampyre, Observations on Madness and Melancholy, Evil Eye in the Western Highlands, Basilisks, Dragons and other Fabled Animals.

The library is particularly strong on philosophy and classics, including Thomas Taylor's seminal 19th-century translation of the complete works of Aristotle and Plato and Henri Estienne's 1578 edition of Plato. There are important works by Newton, Locke, Hume and many others, and unusual stand-alones like a rare copy of The Chameleon, the Oxford University journal featuring poems by Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas.

"As with any book collector, you can see what their passions were by the books that they bought," says Vickers. "Like any bibliophile, he bought more books than he could ever read, but there are bits of paper stuck into lots of books, many of them with his handwritten notes on them, so obviously he did read a tremendous number."

In the art world, Lenkiewicz was regarded as little more than a minor portrait painter - Terry Waite, Billy Connolly and Michael Foot were among his better known subjects. The Times obituary pronounced that "his gift for self-publicity considerably outran his skills with the brush or the pencil".

One of the great enigmas of Lenkiewicz's life is how a man who had no bank account, who frequently paid his bills with paintings and left a legacy of precisely £40 (in a saucepan) could amass one of the finest personal libraries of the last century. "From what people say, sometimes he'd have no money at all and would literally be depending on friends giving him a meal, and the following week he'd have £20,000 in his pocket," says Vickers. "If he did have money, he'd go on a book-buying spree. He really was a bibliophile, he couldn't resist."

The Library of the Late Robert Lenkiewicz will be sold as part of the sale of rare books, manuscripts, maps and photographs at Lyon & Turnbull on 9 and 10 May.