North America

Inscriptions and/or dates add a premium in many classes of ceramics but especially so in delftware. Some afficionados such as the late Syd Levethan made this a particular goal for their collecting.

Fabergé and Russian works of art take the lead at Doyle while Nash heads the history of advertising design sale at Swann

A snake ring made by Clyde for Bonnie heads RR Auctions' memorabilia sale on June 22

One of 170 complete copies of the privately printed Cranwell edition of the 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom, A Triumph', 1926, by TE Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia) leads the Swann Galleries sale on May 16 in New York.

The largest group of photographs from Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) to come on the market since the Museum of the City of New York deaccessioned its duplicates in 2002 is offered in Heritage Auctions’ photographs sale on May 18-19.

Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald were among the financial big-hitters when a third part of the extensive Maurice F Neville collection of modern literature was sold by Sotheby’s New York (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) on April 24.

“We were somewhere around Barstow when the drugs began to take hold” are the opening words of Hunter S Thompson’s notorious and loosely autobiographical novel Fear and Loathing Las Vegas…

Best round scores in the most recent PBA Galleries (20/15% buyer’s premium) golfing sale came with the appearance of a group of the papers of golfing historian and collector CB Clapcott.

Compiled by J Wells Kelly and published in San Francisco in 1862, a rare copy of the First Directory of Nevada Territory…, which was worn, dry and splitting but in original, leather-backed printed boards, sold for $6500 (£5080) in a PBA Galleries sale of April 20.

A £100 Lloyd’s Patriotic Fund sword, one of 23 awarded to captains who fought at Trafalgar, sold for $235,000 (£173,000), plus 15% buyer’s premium, to one of six phone bidders competing at James D Julia in Fairfield, Maine, on April 11.

Ancient art dealer Barakat Gallery has opened an extra US location in West Hollywood to the international galleries run by Fayez Barakat.

This flock of five sheep, Nouveaux Moutons, by the popular French designer François-Xavier Lalanne, will feature in Palm Beach Modern Auction’s two-session sale of around 500 lots on May 6 in Palm Beach.

The second TEFAF New York event opens this week, running from May 4-8 at the Park Avenue Armory. It is the second event that TEFAF has staged in the Big Apple in the past 12 months, the first of which was its inaugural ‘Fall’ edition last October. Whereas that event focused on art from antiquity to 1920, this edition features modern and contemporary art and design.

A major attraction in a PBA Galleries (20/15% buyer’s premium) sale of April 6 was the Samuel Hessel ‘DNA’ collection of scientific papers, journals and books.

Pictured here is one of several etchings by James Abbott McNeil Whistler that will feature in Swann Galleries’ sale of prints on May 2.

This 8¾in (23cm) diameter Liverpool delft charger, dated 1738, is initialled MML for Michael and Mary Lightfoot, members of a Quaker family who lived in Chester County.