Forum Auctions

Offered as part of a recent online sale, a scarce work by Walter Savage Landor that had remained unsold in a New Bond Street auction only last July finally achieved, on April 25 of this year, the high-estimate sum of £2400 that both salerooms had been looking for.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

As we approach the second anniversary of our inaugural 2016 auction, we are again delighted to be the sponsors of Antique Trade Gazette’s ‘Books, Maps & Prints’ supplement.

Running to 600 lots and achieving £560,000 hammer, a recent London sale incorporated a wide range of collecting fields, from Dickensian theatrical ephemera to children’s books and all things Irish.

Collection of more than 100 travel accounts is one highlight of a varied London auction.

Early recipe books can make for absorbing and, to modern readers, occasionally comic or puzzling reading, as demonstrated in three examples from recent sales.

Used to dramatic effect on the cover of the catalogue for a Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) sale, shown below is one of a collection of around 125 monochrome watercolour drawings of Irish lighthouses and the Irish coastline produced c.1860-67.

The many voyages made in search of the lost Franklin expedition feature strongly in another spotlight on polar exploration covering sales in London and New York. The splendid Martin Greene library again provides notable highlights.

Forum Auctions is expanding into the wine and spirits market with the purchase of the assets of Bid for Wine from Stanley Gibbons.

Roman and 20th century poetry, science and sarcasm, Arctic printing, Mayan discoveries, cranes and a porcupine, as well as a miniature master of calligraphy all featured in one of the first large London book sales of the year.

Forum Auctions has expanded its modern and contemporary prints and editions department with two new appointments.

Edge Hall, near Malpas in Cheshire, has been a home to members of the Dod family since the reign of Henry II, but the library – sold by Forum Auctions (25/20% buyer’s premium) on October 12 – was formed in the 19th century and is typical of country house libraries.

Sales held on consecutive days in Edinburgh and London produced two lots that ended up selling for far, far higher than expected sums.

An example of the extremely rare, “surreptitious” edition of John Flamsteed’s Historia Coelestis… – a star atlas that is one of the great rarities in its field – made a record £43,000 at Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on September 27.

Children’s books sold at Forum included a couple of appealing Beatrix Potter items that were first owned by Francis William Clark, who was just two when he was sent a 1912 first of The Tale of Mr Tod.

Pictured here is 'Fanny was obliged to introduce him to Mr Crawford’, an ink and watercolour version of an illustration made by Hugh Thomson for an 1897 Macmillan edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.