News

UK: The first celebrity house sale of the new millennium took place last week near Clifton Hampden in Oxfordshire, where noted aesthete and furnisher to the stars Christopher Gibbs was clearing his Victorian manor house under the auspices of Christie’s.

FRANCE: A fire on September 10 at a storage warehouse used by the Hôtel Drouot at Le Blanc Mesnil, 10 miles north-east of Paris, destroyed goods consigned to five different commissaires-priseurs by some 800 clients.

UK: DEVON dealers J. Collins & Son are well known for their stock of functional period furniture, but looking through their new catalogue of recent acquisitions most would be hard pressed to spot the exact function of the extraordinary piece pictured here.

UK: TOMMASO Zanzotto, chairman of Stocklight, which owns the Bernard J. Shapero Rare Books recently acquired Bloomsbury Book Auctions, has vowed to keep the two companies totally separate.

UK: FOLLOWING the liquidation of Bailey Fairs Ltd, its principal Robert Bailey has announced that he can continue organising his full roster of events as Robert Bailey Fairs Ltd.

UK: WHATEVER the privations of life in the Soviet Union, one could still enjoy a simple game of chess. But because official art is turned to the use of propaganda in every dictatorship, so the more opulent chess sets in post-revolutionary Russia became a metaphor for the struggle between communists and capitalists.

US: TANGIBLE Asset Galleries, the Californian art and antiques auctioneers and dealers, have pulled out of the deal to acquire Gavelnet.com, the Internet and interactive TV auction company.