Collectables

UK: THE market for travel posters is particularly strong with Christie's South Kensington frequently holding specialised sales. Another London house, Onslows (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium), of Fulham relished in the strength of posters at their sale at The Carisbrooke Hall, Marble Arch from May 16-17 when this advert, right, for Bournemouth designed by H.G. Gawthron in 1930 went over estimate.

Pictured here is a selection of books sold in auctions in London and New York.

More selections from the early summer auctions.

UK: THIS 191/2in (49cm) wide engraved ivory-inlaid kingwood and boxwood dressing table casket is one of just six known pieces signed by the Italian royal cabinetmaker Pietro Piffetti.

UK: MEDALS took the top three slots in this toys, juvenilia and ephemera sale but there was a healthy take-up for toys from collectors and from a couple of Liverpool-based specialist dealers at this 537-lot auction that netted Biddle & Webb around £25,000.

UK: ONE OR TWO lots that figured among the higher prices in this Midlands sale would seem to have been sold primarily as collections of travel or botanical plates, and these I have bypassed in favour of the following selection of books.

FRANCE: TOULOUSE-Lautrec’s famous 1893 poster of Jane Avril (printed by Chaix), in a five-coloured lithograph version with the rare text addition Jardin de Paris beneath the dancer’s name, spearheaded the Le Mouel poster sale of May 18 with Fr415,000 (£38,400).

Furniture in country house is eclipsed by piece found in a drawer UK: PAPERWEIGHTS have not hit any sort of headlines in years and anyone outside the coterie of (mostly American) collectors may have assumed they had been relegated to the status of murder weapons in Thirties whodunits – but not so. One became the totally unexpected star of the contents of The Thorne, a country house at Bethsersden which were removed to the salerooms at Canterbury.

UK: ILLUSTRATED here are two items used to decorate the covers of the sale catalogue issued for by Dominic Winter for their May 17 Sports sale.

SWITZERLAND: THE sale of Classical Greek coins held at Leu, Zurich (15 per cent buyer’s premium) on May 16 was billed as the finest at least since WWII. This was hardly modest, but it certainly was not far from the truth. The sale coins were culled from the best sales of exactly the last four decades. Not only this but the coins were invariably among the finest specimens available during this time and many of them had provenances going back a lot further.

UK: TWO LOTS in this Norfolk sale stood head and shoulders above all others, at least in financial terms. One was a group of original illustrations by Charles Kerr for a Rider Haggard adventure story that made £3200 (see caption story below); the other a copy of John Arrowsmith’s London Atlas in modern half calf that reached £6600 (Heald).

UK: THE trial of Dennis Yates, the Nottingham-based radio specialist accused of blackmail and receiving stolen goods after an Enigma code machine was stolen from Bletchley Park Museum, may be delayed by a defence plea to move the venue.

Austria: This broken pane of glass formed a haunting reminder of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, which precipitated World War I.

Apart from a few isolated surprises for cult rarities, Sotheby’s and Christie’s recent wine sales on both sides of the Atlantic bore out this sense of a market in a state of suspended animation.

In the past ten years, there have been only five or six first edition copies of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at auction, and not since 1991 have we seen a copy in the original boards*.

JUST two days after moving operations to new premises at Coleridge House, Shaddongate, Carlisle, the recently retitled firm Thomson Roddick & Medcalf celebrated with a special book sale and took a bid of £17,500 for one of the privately printed subscriber copies of Seven Pillars of Wisdom issued in 1926.

UK: THE football season may now have ended but back on April 24 when the Chester rooms of Phillips (15 per cent buyer’s premium) held their bi-annual sporting sale the season was at its height.

UK: AS with spoons, silver takes on an extra glow in the currently buoyant market for tea caddies an example of which came up at the April 26/27 sale at Taunton held by Greenslade Taylor Hunt’s (15% buyer’s premium).

USA: INCUNABULA offered as part of the April 26 sale of Early Printed Books at Swanns were not in the Friedlaender class, but the top lots did include two books from the press of Gunther Zainer, Augsburg’s first printer.

Dennis Tito is evidently not the only American millionaire with a fascination for space exploration.