Collectables

H.J. PUGH & Co. of Ledbury (5% buyer's premium) will be offering a selection of Railwayana, Military Memorabilia and Other Collectables at auction on Saturday 13th November.

AS is often the case at regular provincial auctions these days, proceedings at Abbotts Auction Rooms' (12% buyer's premium) otherwise fairly routine, 438-lot September 8 sale were enlivened by a couple of novel entries.

NATIONAL media coverage has ensured that most people will have heard about the copy of Dandy No.1, complete with Express Whistler that set a British comic auction record of £18,500 in the Comic Book Postal Auctions sale that ended on September 7.

TEMPTING though it is to say that word from the Specialised Postcard Auctions (10% buyer's premium) was lost in the post, this midsummer auction on July 5 has slipped through the Antiques Trade Gazette net until now. But the £23,000 sale should be recorded as one of the series which have, for years, been catering for this specialist market.

SOME provincial auctioneers and London’s major houses batten down their hatches during the traditionally dead month of August, but for Scarborough Perry (15% buyer's premium) it was business as usual for their August 12-13 sale.

Badges by Philip Atwood, published by the British Museum Press. ISBN 0714150142 £7.99sb AMONG the British Museum’s priceless antiquities is the museum’s collection of some 12,000 badges. A small, hard-to-find exhibition, showing at the museum until January 16, presents just a tiny fraction of this archive.

OUR hugely busy lives are made more bearable by labour-saving inventions. For every one that made it from drawing board to retailer there were hundreds more that didn’t catch on. With a subtitle of “and amazing gadgets, gizmos and thingamabobs”, this is a pictorial illustration of some 100 extremely wacky and ingenious inventions which Maurice Collins has built up over 30 years, alongside his collection of posters and printed ephemera.

LONDON-based Comic Book Postal Auctions hold several auction highs for British comics including, earlier this year, a world record £12,100 for The Beano No. 1. However, that remarkable price could well be threatened by this copy of The Dandy No. 1.

THE story of the Boscobel Oak that gave numerous pubs a name also, after 1660, became an object of Royalist pilgrimage. By 1680 a protective wall was built round the trunk but, such was the souvenir hunting, by the early 18th century the tree had almost been destroyed. The oak at Boscobel today is almost certainly a descendant and not the one where Charles Stuart spent a sleepless night as he fled Cromwell’s heavies.

OCTOBER 21, 2005 will see the bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar and many celebrations marking the most decisive naval victory in modern history are planned. However, it will not be until January 9, 2006 that we mark 200 years since the funeral of its most famous protagonist.

SELECTIVE bidding at Hobbs Parker's (10% buyer's premium) 704-lot June 10 outing focused on the better-quality entries such as an Art Nouveau belt buckle by Liberty & Co., which fetched £400, and two Mappin & Webb silver photograph frames dating to 1917 and 1916 which took a respectable £400.

PROBABLY the best-known and the most coveted of the novelty table lighters made by the Ronson Lighter Co. is the 1936 patent Touch-Tip Bartender.

THE railways themselves may not be as dependable as they were, but you can absolutely count on Sheffield Railwayana Auctions coming up with the goods. June 12 saw the specialists, who still don’t charge buyer’s premium, steaming along to a £438,000 total from 530 lots.

THE Fan Museum in Greenwich, the world’s only museum entirely dedicated to the history of fans and the craft of fan-making, have acquired an important fan painted around 1889 by Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942).

EARLIER this year, when Comic Book Postal Auctions sold a copy of Beano No.1 for a record £11,000, I briefly looked into the reasons why Dandy, which preceded Beano by several months, is not quite so avidly pursued and looked forward to seeing just how much the next Dandy No. 1 to come to auction might make.

THIS walking stick, thought to have once belonged to John Adams, the longest surviving of the Bounty mutineers, will be on offer at Sworders' (15% buyer’s premium) Summer Country House sale on July 20-21. It is made from a vine found on Pitcairn Island, where Adams and eight of the other mutineers famously settled after landing there on January 23, 1790.

ALTHOUGH catalogued as a late 18th century fruitwood apple form tea caddy, this finely turned and carved 5 1/2in (13cm) high vessel sold by Biddle & Webb (15% buyer’s premium) on April 1 was more accurately a melon.

IN the 18th century, it was widely believed that meteorites found on Earth were pieces of the moon that had been blasted into space by volcanic eruption. We now know that almost all meteorites come from the asteroid belt and that it was the pummelling that the moon received in the early years of the formation of our solar system that allowed some chunks of moon rock to escape the moon’s gravitational influence and, periodically, find their way to Earth.

TWO BOX files of Ford manufacturers’ catalogues, advertising material and other ephemera of 1920s and ’30s motoring interest brought a bid of £1550 in a May 19 sale held by Thomson Roddick & Medcalf and the only other lot to reach four figures was a collection of some 370 postcards relating almost entirely to Ulverston and Furness.

GOOD-quality mahogany and oak furniture took most of the better prices in Mitchells' (15% buyer's premium) 1566-lot May 13-14 auction which totalled £325,000.