Collectables

Literary anniversaries are a good story to tell to potential sellers but do they bring greater interest and greater prices?

The name of William Heath Robinson (1872-1944) is enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary. Definition: “Ingeniously or ridiculously over-complicated in design or construction”.

A selection of stand-out results achieved at auctions in the UK and abroad.

Networking is far more than a good chinwag. As Baldwin’s of St James’s medal specialist Mark Smith explains, it can also be good business.

A new generation of dealers, auctioneers and fair organisers is keen to show there is a thriving future for the trade.

Tom Lintern-Mole has just finished filming a video in his shop to advertise the latest book fair on YouTube.

No fewer than 840 lots were offered in the bumper April 5-6 sale held by Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium). The most successful of them, at a record £32,000, was a presentation copy of a pioneering work that has been described as “the first practical statement of socialist doctrine”, Robert Owen’s A New View of Society… of 1813-14.

A major attraction in a PBA Galleries (20/15% buyer’s premium) sale of April 6 was the Samuel Hessel ‘DNA’ collection of scientific papers, journals and books.

A Beatrix Potter collection running to 62 lots got a Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) sale of March 30 up and running.

Offered by Keys (20% buyer’s premium) on April 6, the Sir Malcolm Arnold Collection proved to be a problematic one.

Published in 1631 in Rinteln, a small town in Lower Saxony, Friederich Spee’s Cautio Criminalis, seu de Processibus Contra Sagas is a first edition in much later boards of a book that has been described as the first serious attack on witchcraft trials and their use of torture.