HEREFORDSHIRE history man the late Basil Butcher had a keen eye for a bargain. Most of the books that marked his near-definitive collection of county writings cost him little over 'five bob'.

Those wise buys go up for auction at Brightwells' Leominster saleroom next week worth much more. Talk in the trade is of one of the sales of the year.

And friends find it hard to believe that the man himself won't be with them, as he so often was, when bidding begins.

"Probably smiling with disbelief at the price made by some book he'd bought for about five bob," said one of those friends, Paul Latcham.

To know Basil Butcher was to know Herefordshire. This 'institution' met the most casual of enquiries with the same grace as those from the bishops, deans, archdeacons and canons who served his beloved Hereford Cathedral.

Many local families held his word as 'gospel' over arcane aspects of their past or estates. Often he was the one to initiate contact having found out first.

A love of letter writing was extended to regular - widely read - articles for Herefordshire Country Life, but he was always willing to 'go live' with slide show talks. All this evolved around his books. Books - crammed full of cuttings, correspondence, anything related to their subject matter - that he began buying as a young man.

On his death last year, the Basil Butcher library was the envy of anyone caring to chronicle the county, rarities running from Domesday to Who's Who, meeting all manner of specifics along the way.

A remarkable achievement given the limited resources its compiler had to fund his hobby. The canny 'five bob' pitch played well, honed, perhaps, through selling cars in the county for so long.

Though he could never contemplate parting with such a library in his lifetime, Mr Butcher worried over the immense task it meant for his family when he was gone.

Paul Latcham, whose enthusiasm for antiquarian books rivals his long-time friend's love of Herefordshire history, promised to help in this and has catalogued the 'exceptional and unusual' collection with a view to auction.

He found 'almost all the important books on Hereford-shire' were there, with only occasional sales accounting for gaps.

"If someone was after a particular book and it was one he felt he could do without, he was not averse to parting with it - but only if the offer was a good one."

Even with its gaps, the Butcher library is as near definitive as it gets when it comes to county writings, says Brightwells' Geoffrey Croft who, over 30 years in the auction game, has never known a collection like it."We've done big book sales before, but not where everything was so local."

The Butcher Collection goes under the hammer from 11am on June 4 as 375 individual lots ranging in reserve from £10 to £1,000.

OFF the shelf - some of the lots in the Basil Butcher library sale.

Herefordshire Illustrated Who's Who (1933)

Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley (1854)

A complete run of Woolhope club transactions (1852-1998)

12 editions of The Herefordshire Magazine from March 1907 to February 1908.

1645 Civil War pamphlet entitled - A Declaration of His Excellency the Earle of Leven: concerning the rising of the Scottish Army from the Siege of the City of Hereford.

Topographical and Historical Description of the County of Hereford (no date but one of the Beauties of England and Wales series)

History and Antiquities of the City and Cathedral-Church of Hereford (1717)

Directory and Gazetteer of Herefordshire (1890)

Hereford is Heaven and other verses (Geoffrey Bright 1948)

Picturesque Description of the River Wye (12 hand coloured aquatint plates mounted on card 1841)

Minutes of Evidence taken before the select Committee on the Hereford City Election Petitions (1866) and a number of books and pamphlets relating to Herefordsh-ire planning and local government.

The Hereford Earthquake of December 17, 1896 (1899)

Herefordshire Cricket (1903)

Nooks and Corners of Herefordshire (1892)

Herefordshire Portraits (1908)