Auctions

Past playthings by a host of famous vintage toy manufacturers will feature in the next Signature sale of Toys and Trains held by the specialist auction house Bertoia in Vineland, New Jersey, on March 25.

Typewriters on which famous books came into existence have featured on these pages before, but not for some time – and certainly not machines of a kind that that continue to be used by their owner to this day.

The Pittsfield, Massachusetts, auction house Fontaine’s has a track record of selling good examples of horology and has achieved some very high prices recently for elaborate English clocks made for the Chinese market.

A select sale of just 31 lots of Asian art assembled by a Japanese collector and his sons raised a recordbreaking $262.8m (£215.5m) at Christie’s New York on March 15. It made more in a single evening than any New York Asian sale series.

The taxidermy market continues to grow – particularly for showpiece lots such as the Bengal tiger’s head offered at Andrew Smith (19% buyer’s premium) of Winchester on February 8.

Munich coin fair raided by 30 police as Nagel moves Asian sale to Austria

This large, 6ft (1.8m) diameter circular oil on canvas, 'April' is the work of the Nabis painter Maurice Denis. It is one of three ceiling panels commissioned from the artist by the musician Ernest Chausson for his Parisian town house between 1894 and 1899.

ATG’s selection of auction lots bought by internet bidders on thesaleroom.com from the period March 9-15, 2017. This includes both the highest prices over estimate and the top prices paid online.

Rare painting by 19th century American artist achieves record price at Bonhams

Possibly the first printed reference to a ‘Great White’ shark attack is found in a four-page pamphlet, printed in Naples in 1721, from which the woodcut shown here is taken.

A lithograph of David Roberts’ (1796-1864) lost painting The siege and destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans under the command of Titus took top honours at Staffordshire auction house Cuttlestones (17.5% buyer’s premium) on March 2-3.

Crymogaea sive rerum Islandicarum… is a very rare history of Iceland by Arngrimur Jónsson, a scholar and teacher also known as Arngrimur the Learned.

A Chinese Kangxi period triple gourd vase that once belonged to the financier JP Morgan will feature as one of the highlights in Heritage Auctions’ inaugural Asian Art sale in Dallas on April 2.

Dealers and fairs are embracing the ‘mix it up’ approach to offering a wide range of styles and eras, as noted in our BADA fair preview (ATG No 2282).

The £810,000 wucai fish at Fellows’ (20% buyer’s premium) sale at Birmingham on February 27 (ATG No 2282) overshadowed everything else on offer but there were a number of other areas of interest among the 1250 lots.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning lots fall flat... but annotated Dorian Gray leaves treble the estimate

With BBC Radio 4 currently offering a season of programmes focusing on the Red Planet in fact and fiction, a couple of books from the Edgar Rice Burroughs series of Martian fantasies that made high prices in a recent US sale are an appropriate choice for these reports.