Collectables

Magazine by ‘heathen staff’ sells for 10-times top estimate in the city where it was produced...

A number of books on plastic surgery featured in a recent Californian sale including an 1833, first English edition of Johann F Dieffenbach’s Surgical Observations on the Restoration of the Nose.

One highlight of a February 20 sale held in Italy was the handsome, armorially bound 1694 first edition of the Swiss born architect Carlo Fontana’s Templum Vaticanum.

Selling at $400,000 (£285,715), the original cover artwork for the 100th issue of Amazing Spider-Man comic led a recent three-day American comic and comic artwork auction that raised a total of around $7.2m (£5.14m).

‘Rock Star’ of physics and Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman, habitually refused to sign copies of his books, telling his editor: “I’m not going to go on TV and I’m not going to sign any books!”

Flash from the past at the Diss rooms of TW Gaze (18% buyer’s premium).

Ephemera Society member Robertino Poposki has been awarded the silver prize in the ephemera class at the Spring Stampex 2018, organised by the Association of British Philatelic Societies.

Dwarfed as they were by the £440,000 oil of St John the Evangelist (see ATG last week, No 2332), a number of other lots helped to make Holloway’s (20% buyer’s premium) first major sale of the year in Banbury on February 27 an event to remember.

The script for the very first Doctor Who episode owned by the first actor to play the role is coming up at auction in the West Midlands.

An album of Indian photographs sold for £32,000 in Edinburgh provided ATG’s Pick of the Week in the previous issue (No 2331), but there was much more on offer in that 550-lot Scottish sale.

A single-owner collection of Tri-ang and other British toys will go under the hammer in what has been described as the largest of its type to come to auction.

Commonly known as a What The Butler Saw machine, a late 19th-early 20th century Mutoscope was the most alluring of a consignment of a collection of amusement arcade machines offered at Canterbury Auction Galleries (20% buyer’s premium).

Sold for $28,000 (£20,820) by Christie’s New York (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) on December 5 was this original drawing by Ralph Steadman for the 1971 first appearance of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Running to some 300pp and described by the auctioneers as “a most enchanting album, redolent of Jane Austen and her world”, a scrapbook compilation of paper cut-outs, views and figural studies, sold for £1550 in a general sale held in Sussex.

A Parisian Book of Hours dating to c.1440-50 was among illuminated or decorated manuscripts sold during in the closing weeks of 2017.

Outselling much of the sort of furniture its owner could have worked on, an 18th century carpenter’s oak tool chest on stand was among the pleasant surprises for vendors at the opening sale of the year at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (21% buyer’s premium).