North America

A classic, rare 1938 poster for the London Underground designed by the Surrealist artist Man Ray is one of the highlights of a graphic design sale to be held by Swann Galleries on May 3.

Weschlers’ mixed-owner Capital Collections sale in Rockville, Maryland, on May 11 will offer a very wide range of fine and decorative arts.

Published in 1895, Wright & Dixon’s Guide to American Golf… was one of the very first books on the game to appear in that country. A copy sold on April 12 in San Francisco for $42,500 (£29,930) was billed as “perhaps the only copy extant”.

New York City hosts another edition as the fair format becomes established in the US

Printed for circulation only among members of the imperial family and those foreign dignitaries who had participated in the celebrations, an album recording the 1883 coronation in Moscow of Tsar Alexander III and the Empress Marie Feodorovna sold for $30,000 (£21,125) in a US sale.

Bound in recent times as six volumes in elaborately gilt crushed scarlet morocco, a 1614-17 Prague first of a major commentary on the Mishnah by Rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (1579-1654), was a highlight of a recent New York sale of Judaica.

A New York law banning the sale of antique ivory has been challenged in court by two leading US antiques dealers associations.

Sold for $300,000 (£214,185) apiece in a recent New York sale were three very well-known works from the worlds of cartography and natural history.

A restituted portrait of a German electoral prince by Lucas Cranach the Elder, missing for nearly 80 years, has sold for $6.6m (£4.7m).

Helen Larson was a keen collector of costume, especially pieces with historical associations. She spent half a century building up a collection that encompassed early costume, couture and pieces with historical or celebrity provenance, helped by her friend Doris Langley Moore who founded the Costume Museum in Bath.

“They were as bold, diverse, and brave as René Lalique and his peers had been in the 1900s, bucking convention and tradition to change the landscape of British jewellery.”

A sale devoted to 700 lots of magic memorabilia is to be held by Potter & Potter Auctions in Chicago on April 28.

Composed to mark the departure from these shores after two years of self-imposed exile in Ireland and England, a Farewell Song of Frederick Douglass, on Quitting England for America – the Land of his Birth was published in London in 1847.

Rather slimmer than he is seen in the later films that are perhaps his principal memorial, this ink self-portrait by the comedian, juggler and actor WC Fields dates from his earlier, vaudeville years.