Collectables

Pictured here is 'Fanny was obliged to introduce him to Mr Crawford’, an ink and watercolour version of an illustration made by Hugh Thomson for an 1897 Macmillan edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

More than 100 lots of robots and space toys feature in Morphy Auctions’ 1700-lot toy and doll sale to be held on September 16-17 in Denver, Pennsylvania.

A blaze which tore through Norwich Central Library one August morning in 1994 destroyed thousands of historic documents and more than 100,000 books.

Eight fine bindings are the focus of this report, which draws mainly on sales held in the UK and US in the summer months – but also includes one to come in the new season sales.

Sir Stanley Matthews’ first football contract showing the legend was paid a princely £5 a week has sold at Derbyshire saleroom Hansons.

Pieces with a maritime slant proved popular at the sale at Cowes held by HRD Auction Rooms (15% buyer’s premium) on August 3 during the yacht-fest that is Cowes Week on the Isle of Wight.

Three names prized by collectors helped this 19th century German train set, pictured, to top the 330 lots of toys and railwayana offered at the David Duggleby (20% buyer’s premium) sale at Scarborough on August 12.

Militaria has the advantage of a wide price range for items. A photograph sold in Cirencester on July 7 was a good example of ‘more affordable’ levels.

Music, in printed editions rather than autograph scores, played a significant part in raising a premium-inclusive €1.65m (£1.45m) for the third portion of the Pierre Bergé library to come to auction.

Tattooed from head to foot, this ‘Native of Nukahiva’ (in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia) features on one of the two frontispieces and a folding chart that form the illustrative content of the 1813, first English edition of Adam von Krusenstern’s 1803-06 Voyage round the World…

A 1765 first of John L Cowley’s The theory of perspective demonstrated… sold for £17,000 by Christie’s (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on July 12 appears to be the only first edition recorded at auction.

The button from the Lancaster bomber of 617 Squadron that released the ‘bouncing bomb’ which destroyed the Möhne Dam has sold after being offered at auction for the first time.

Sold for £400 on July 5 by Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium), as part of an online sale of cricket books, was one of just 50 specially bound copies of The Catch: A Correspondence by Harold Pinter and Alan Wilkinson.

Thomaston Place Auction Galleries of Maine is holding its annual summer sale, a three-day offering of more than 1500 lots covering a huge variety of different categories.

An RAF logbook added value to a Second World War casualty group sold at Ipswich saleroom Lockdales (19.5% buyer’s premium) on July 15-16.