Collectables

It’s not difficult to see how Dunhill ‘fish tank’ lighters got their name. Not only do these 1950s perspex and electroplated lighters resemble miniature aquariums, but most were decorated with aquatic subjects.

Thieves broke into Goldsworth Books & Prints some time between 5pm on Saturday and 9am on Sunday July 29-30, stealing books, maps and prints to the value of over £30,000.

“WE will make a name for ourselves and Australia tomorrow.” This was how Captain Shout fired up his band of troops the night before the assault at Gallipoli in the First World War.

In June 1941 an 18-year-old apprentice cabinetmaker, L.F. Gillet of Stratford-on-Avon, won first prize in the prestigious Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers annual competition. The prize was a dovetailed steel and rosewood rebating mitre the ASW had specially commissioned from the Norris factory.

More than two decades since the first sale of golfing memorabilia, this once-booming niche market stands at an important crossroads.

Four Beatrix Potter watercolour Christmas cards, recently discovered in a Wiltshire attic, will be sold by Highworth, Swindon auctioneers Kidson-Trigg on September 20. The cards have been consigned by descendants of the original recipients, Elizabeth (1888-1977) and Elinor (1886-1979) Lupton.

IT set a British auction record for a Shakespeare First Folio and made the highest price ever seen for a printed book at Sotheby’s London (20/12% buyer’s premium) – but hushed voices at the back of the saleroom were suggesting that the £2.5m hammer price represented pretty good value for a near-perfect copy of the most important book in English literature.

OF the many publications generated by Captain Cook’s exploits in the Pacific, the most curious is surely A Catalogue of the Different Specimens of Cloth Collected in the Three Voyages of Captain Cook to the Southern Hemisphere...

M1, one of the most sought-after UK registration numbers, set a new world record price for a car number plate when it sold for £300,000 at Bonhams’ Goodwood Festival of Speed sale of Sports, Competition and Collectors’ Motor Cars and Automobilia on July 7.

An early 19th century boxwood and bone Napoleonic prisoner-of-war model of the Third Rate 74-gun HMS Mars fired a shot across the bows at Hampton & Littlewood's (15% buyer's premium) Maritime Sale in Exeter on June 21 when it set a new house record of £60,000.

IN what must be one of the least surprising private treaty sales negotiated, The Martin Luther King Jr Collection will go to Morehouse College, Dr King's alma mater in his home city of Atlanta.

There was nothing dull or predictable about the coin sale at Spink on June 29 when an expectant crowd gathered to witness the sale of one of the rarest of English Medieval coins: the gold Double Leopard florin of Edward III which was minted for only a few months in 1344.

THE notorious map thief Edward Forbes Smiley III has appeared in court in the US where he admitted to stealing 97 antique maps worth more than $3m.

Compiled in the second half of the 15th century, the Fechtbuch of Hans Talhoffer (fl. 1435-82), the most celebrated and experienced fighting-master of the age, is a veritable encyclopaedia of medieval combat.

Before The Great War the Lincoln engineering company, William Foster and Co, was synonymous with the very best threshing machines. By 1918, managing director Sir William Tritton, together with Major W.G. Wilson, had been credited by the Royal Commission as the inventor of an armoured fighting vehicle forever known as the tank.

Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton was one of the most notorious British commanders of the American Revolution. After leading a series of successful operations in both the north and south, he returned home after the war as one of the most famous men in England, sat for a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and began a long-term affair with actress and royal consort Mary Robinson.

AN unseen and apparently unique collection of photographs, letters and maps that illuminates the campaigns of Field Marshall Montgomery in the Second World War has emerged at Kent auctioneers Watermans.

Madame Tussauds added Winston Churchill to their waxwork tableaux for the first time in 1908, but had produced another half dozen portraits before his death in 1965. The last of them was put up for sale by Dominic Winter on May 18.

“This was the earliest Cup Final programme I’ve ever seen,” said Graham Budd (15% buyer’s premium), referring to lot 747 in his sale on May 9-10 in association with Sotheby’s Olympia.

THE world stamp market is reeling this week after what could prove to be a €5bn pyramid selling scheme was unmasked in Spain.