Auctions

UK: Early walnut is all about colour and choice of veneer, and this Queen Anne bureau bookcase 7ft 10in high by 5ft 9in wide (2.38 x 1.06) scored highly on both counts at the Partridge Green salerooms of Rupert Toovey on January 19.

UK: THE Travel sale held by Sotheby’s on December 14 included a fine collection of what are known as ‘Lafreri-School’ maps, the product of a remarkable flowering of cartographic arts that took place in Rome and Venice, c.1540-70.

US: THOUGH he grew up on a Kansas farm, far from the sea, Charles E. Driscoll, who died in 1951, devoted much of his life to the study of piracy and as well as writing a great deal about his pet subject, assembled a marvellous library that was bequeathed to Wichita Public Library at his death. Last year the library decided to sell off the collection to raise funds for other acquisitions and on December 12, Christie’s East of New York sold the Driscoll Piracy library for $427,570 (£292,860).

UK: DECORATIVE pieces stood out at this 1000-lot £104,000 sale of 1000 basically general lots.

UK: QUITE possibly starting its long career as a Christmas present for a child, this Steiff teddy bear was the familiar target of collectors at the Horsham rooms of Latimers (15 per cent buyer’s premium) on December 14, the second of a two-day dispersal at this new addition to the Sussex auction world.

UK: THE FIRST Tolkiens of 2001 combined to add £11,000 to the takings at this Bath sale.

UK: A VOLUME containing a dozen reports, tracts and pamphlets relating to the 18th century trial of a local man, Aylsham lawyer Christopher Layer, went to Jarndyce at £400 in this first Aylsham sale of the year.

FRANCE: THIS Heures de la Vierge manuscript, from Auvergne or the Lyon area (c.1485) fetched Fr215,000 (£20,5000) at Bondu on December 22. This Book of Hours (Use of Rome), 61/2 x 61/2in (17cm x 17cm), had a tired 16th century brown morocco binding but contained 14 full-page paintings influenced by Jean Colombe and artists from Bourges, and many of its 131 leaves (from a probable 135) had decorative borders with flowers, strawberries, fabulous creaturs and acanthus leaves.

UK: ONE CHART was very creased and there was a stain on the frontispiece that penetrated to the title page and early leaves, but the copy of Bligh’s Narrative of the Mutiny on [the...] Bounty offered in Carlisle was a tightly bound copy of the 1790 first edition in a contemporary binding of quarter calf and marbled boards, and it sold at £3150.

FRANCE: Venezia Fodaco dei Turghi, Carlo Naya’s moonlit view of the Grand Canal (c.1870), headed the Baron-Ribeyre photo sale on December 19. The albumen print, 161/2 x 21in (41 x 53cm), was dubbed in perfect condition and raced to a treble-estimate Fr55,000 (£5200).

FRANCE: A LOUIS XVI mahogany gueridon with three scrolled legs, stamped Molitor, sold to the French trade in Dijon on December 9 for Fr1.6m (£150,000), five times estimate – even though the table was in indifferent condition, having been recovered from a local attic.

US: DESCRIBED as “probably as good or better than any copy at auction in the last five years”, a 1951 first of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the cloth binding extremely clean and the dust jacket in “nearly superb” condition, made $7500 (£5170) in the December 18 sale held by the Baltimore Book Company.

US: THE PIRACY collection mentioned above was not the only sale held by Christie’s East on December 12. Three important Hemingway lots which formed part of a general sale are described below, and in Antiques Trade Gazette No. 1472 I featured works by Ayn Rand, among them two works on Hollywood, published whilst she was still a young woman in Russia, which sold well.

UK: THIS looks the life! Relaxed in elegant company, high above the world and its cares on a sunlit terrace with parasols and palms.

UK: CLOSE to 640 lots were packed into the catalogue of the last Bloomsbury sale of the old year – half of them scientific and medical – but compared with the sale of the previous week, reported in Antiques Trade Gazette No. 1473, four-figure bids were few and far between.

UK: SUPPLY the goods and, through hell or, in this case, high water, they will come. The new Chichester operation of Henry Adams underlined this article of auctioneering faith when at their second sale they were able to put up a good range of items sought by the middle and upper markets and, despite the serious local flooding (one would-be buyer marooned miles away phoned to complain that the sale should have been cancelled), they enjoyed a considerable success.

UK: THE most prominent entry to this monthly two-day sale in Devon was an early 19th century linen press had come from a South Coast farmhouse.

UK: “THAT is a heck of a lot of beverage, even for me,” said one dealer looking over the 64 lots of tea and coffee pots, some shown here, at Phillips (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) sale in Bury St. Edmunds on December 6-7.

US: A SCIENTIFIC library formed by New York businessman Joseph A. Frielich was sold by Sotheby’s New York for $10.7m (£7.2m) on January 10-11, 2001, and among many lots that made much higher than predicted sums was a magnificent copy of Albertus Seba’s Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri...

UK: WELCOME as the activity of interior decorators is on today’s auction scene, it was still a little surprising to note the interest that some took in this 1950s butcher boy’s bicycle, right, offered at the Scarborough sale held by David Duggleby (10per cent buyer’s premium) on December 4.