North America

Among the pieces included in Freemans’ Art and Design sale is this Womb chair by the Finnish-American designer Eero Saarinen, a design from 1947-48.

This oil on canvas by Edouard Leon Cortes (1882-1929) titled Café de la Paix will be included in a first 350-lot mixed-owner session at Helmuth Stone.

Twenty-seven looted artefacts seized from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art have been returned to Italy and Egypt as part of longrunning investigations by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit.

The principal portion of a two-part sale conducted by Sotheby’s New York included not one, but three lots that brought seven-figure bids.

Sold online for a record $20,000 (£16,340) at the former Butterfields, now Bonhams Los Angeles (27.5/26/20/14.5% buyer’s premium) salerooms as part of the David Lloyd collection of modern literature was a 1909 first edition of Frank L Baum’s 'The Road to Oz'.

Sold at Bonhams Skinner (27.5/26/20/14.5% buyer’s premium) was a 1584 first edition of Reginald Scot’s 'The Discoverie of Witchcraft….'

The October 13 sale of Early Printed Books at Swann Auction Galleries in New York will feature part two of the library of Ken Rapoport: English literature, tales of chivalry from the Renaissance, and more Shakespeare, Chaucer, Cervantes, Donne, and others.

Freeman’s September 21 Books and Manuscripts auction, in Pennsylvania is led by an ‘extremely rare’ first edition of 'New Englands First Fruits' (estimate $20,000-30,000), a 1643 account of Puritan evangelisation in New England.

Sold at $440,000 (£371,000), the most expensive lot in a three-day auction at Heritage (25% buyer’s premium) was a logbook kept on the B29 Superfortress bomber that dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945.

A well-preserved and boxed version of the 1960s Japanese Masudaya Machine Man robot was the highest flyer in the Morphy Auctions (20% buyer’s premium) August 9-10 toys and collectables sale in Denver, Pennsylvania.

Bertoia’s sale of the collection of Bill and Stevie Weart will be held over two days in Vineland, New Jersey, on September 8-9.

Doyle in New York is holding a Fine Art auction on September 14 offering a selection of affordable paintings, prints and sculpture that spans the late 19th through the 20th centuries.

Massachusetts sale includes elaborate examples of early needlework from across the Atlantic

A rediscovered painting by the German Symbolist and Munich Secessionist artist Franz von Stuck (1863-1928) is to be offered by Soulis Auctions in Lone Jack, (suburban Kansas City) Missouri, on September 23.

Maynards in Richmond, British Columbia, which offer this Chamberlain’s Worcester armorial part dessert service.

Making its third appearance at auction in almost 60 years, the 34pp autograph manuscript of Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’, a tale from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes collection of his stories that first appeared in The Strand magazine in 1893, has sold for $280,000 (£236,090) in Dallas.

The latest sale of Clocks, Watches, & Scientific Instruments held by Bonhams Skinner (25% buyer’s premium) included one of perhaps only 50 surviving Tornek-Rayville TR-900 stainless steel dive watches.

English and Continental ‘country house’ offerings are rare in the US but not gone forever