Collectables

The leading contenders in the December 12 General Election are struggling to land any meaningful blows on each other, despite being more than happy to be photographed in boxing rings.

Work featuring the boy wizard Harry Potter is a familiar sight at the PBFA’s annual Christmas event

Two music-makers caught the eye, or rather ear, at Adam Partridge’s (20% buyer’s premium) Macclesfield sale.

The huge and ongoing task of cataloguing thousands of cigarette cards and other ephemera from a deceased collector’s home – he had walls pasted with beer mats instead of wallpaper – paid off for Bristol auctioneer Gavin Aplin.

Top-seller at the latest sale of Islamic and Indian Art and antiquities held at Roseberys (25% buyer’s premium) in West Norwood was a 19th century Sikh enamelled and diamond-set gold medal.

Original watercolours intended for pioneering, unpublished work are now highly valued

A selection of maps of US cities from recent auctions stateside.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

Bringing the highest price yet at one of Richard Edmonds’ (20% buyer’s premium) specialist Petroliana and Automobilia sales in Chippenham was a rare petrol pump globe.

Hornby Dublo collectors fought spirited battles for clockwork rarities at Duggleby Stephenson’s (18.75% buyer’s premium) York sale.

“There is no such thing as modern art, there is only art and it is perpetual.” The author of these lines was, perhaps surprisingly, the highly modern Austrian painter Egon Schiele and are part of an artistic manifesto written on July 17, 1911.

A good-quality violin linked to the German maker Jacobus Stainer (1619-83) led a group of previously overlooked musical instruments in a Towcester auction.

The practice of placing a metal mark on a building to indicate insurance against a fire started in earnest after the Great Fire of London (1666). Each insurance company had its own fire service and distinctive logo.

Instruction from author Fleming was thankfully not followed and first issue survives.

A rare work by William Lambarde, the antiquarian, writer on legal subjects and author of the first county history, A Perambulation of Kent of 1576, was another highlight from the library of the late Eric Stanley, professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford (see reports in previous ATGs).

While the binding, with Charles Ricketts’ familiar gilt design on the front cover, is not in the best of conditions, an inscription on the half-title of this example of one of the 250 large paper copies of Oscar Wilde’s 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' published by Ward Lock in 1891 ensured that it set an auction record.