Forum Auctions

Very much the surprise of an online sale held by Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) was a lot presenting incomplete fragments of 'An Almanacke and Prognosticatyon'… for the year 1552.

Two broadsides describing and illustrating with wood engravings the executions of convicted murderers were sold online at £1600 apiece by Forum.

Featuring one historiated initial depicting a priest blessing the marriage of a couple who stand before him, a medieval guide to marital problems and resolutions made £32,000 online at Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium).

Two very different lots helped Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) to boost its first major sale of the year.

A remarkable collection of books from The Birmingham Assay Office Library will be offered at Forum Auctions in London on March 26.

Bid just short of the high estimate to sell at £56,000 in a Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) sale was a rare complete set in 25 original parts of John Gould’s 'Monograph of the Trochilidae, or Family of Humming Birds' of 1849-61.

Among the selection of instructional games and pastimes featured at Forum Auctions (25/12/12% buyer’s premium) on November 21 two of the more successful lots were published by Edward Wallis.

Watercolour collection sold at auction represents a ‘who’s who’ of the city in the 1830s

Personal devotional prayer books, known as a Book of Hours, were popular among the wealthy and powerful in late medieval Europe. Illuminated with miniature paintings depicting the life of Christ, the Virgin Mary and saints, they were sometimes personalised for the patrons who commissioned them.

Bid to a record £20,000 at a Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on September 26 was a beautifully bound example of Piranesi’s Campus Martius Antiquae Urbis.

Code locked in a briefcase for two decades, a finely preserved, 1997 first issue of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was finally released this summer after being delivered by its Lancashire owners into the hands of a Derbyshire saleroom.

Estimated at £10,000-15,000 in a Forum Auctions sale of November 21 is a French indenture agreement of 1421 with a certain added English appeal.

Much of Paula Rego’s (b.1935) work is concerned with narrative, as seen in this limited-edition lithograph of a girl reading a book.

A small but very successful section of a recent London sale offered a group of just eight lots related to the British Arctic Expedition of 1875-76.