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MASTERING search engines is the key to gaining better exposure on the Internet, according to one firm who have started offering an alternative to signing up to major portal sites.

At the end of the morning session of Sotheby’s Garden Statuary sale at Billingshurst, the National Trust took over the rostrum to offer such items for gardening enthusiasts as an avenue of 40 young limes from the Trust’s nursery in Cheshire, home visits from Trust gardening experts and so on, but the piece of trade interest was a scrapbook kept by Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst donated by her son Nigel Nicolson.

MORE than 20 of New York’s top dealers who had signed up for the cancelled International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show are holding special selling exhibitions in their shops and galleries from October 18 to 23.

Stanley Matthews’ 1953 FA Cup winner’s medal, sold for £20,000 to TV presenter and Stoke fan Nick Hancock, was the lot on which national media publicity focussed, but the Football Memorabilia sale held by Sotheby’s on September 21 – one of the first sales at the new Olympia salerooms – also contained some 150 lots of programmes, match cards, magazines and related ephemera.

AS EVER, this Norfolk sale on 14 September at Keys, Aylsham provided an eclectic mix of stock, from the seriously antiquarian to the frivolous, from a 16th century summation and translation of Anglo-Saxon laws to a famous tale of porcine practicality.

FRANCE: The 2nd part of the J. Lemarchand Collection of trains and toys came under the hammer in Chartres (Lelièvre-Maiche-Paris) in a 680-lot sale on September 15 & 16.

THE cataclysmic events of September 11 in New York have thrown into spasm a UK art market that was already showing worrying signs of slowdown both in terms of supply and demand.