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UK: ART & Antiques on the Internet is the title of a one-day conference being staged at the Royal Institution on Thursday October 26 by the Institute of Art and Law and the RICS

IT WILL simplify sales say Sotheby’s. Within the next month Sotheby’s will be merging their two online ventures, sothebys.com and sothebys.amazon.com under the sothebys.com banner.

UK: Scholars probably know less about the makers of 18th century caddies and knife boxes than the little they have gleaned thus far regarding the makers of Georgian furniture.

UK: THE Thames-side meadows at Christopher Gibbs’ Manor House in Oxfordshire contained a number of pieces of classical statuary with important provenances, but none proved so valuable as this unheralded stone model of a recumbent cow.

LONDON: Renaissance period combined scaphe dial and astrolabe made by Arsenius of Louvain, dated 1563.

$45m fine for Sotheby’s but five years to pay: Diana ‘Dede’ Brooks, former president and chief executive of Sotheby’s, has pleaded guilty in a Manhattan Federal Court to price-fixing with Christie’s between 1993 and 1999.

UK: THE Court of Appeal has set a precedent under case law which forces auctioneers to sell to the highest bidder where a reserve has not been set, regardless of how low the winning bid is.

FRANCE: RARELY can so many leading lights in the international art and antiques business have been gathered in the same room as happened at the luxurious George V hotel in Paris on Tuesday, October 3.

Sotheby’s board of directors have approved payment of $256m to clients in the civil lawsuit which claimed collusion with Christie’s in setting charges for buyers in 1992 and sellers in 1995.

UK: DEVON dealers J. Collins & Son are well known for their stock of functional period furniture, but looking through their new catalogue of recent acquisitions most would be hard pressed to spot the exact function of the extraordinary piece pictured here.

UK: The first celebrity house sale of the new millennium took place last week near Clifton Hampden in Oxfordshire, where noted aesthete and furnisher to the stars Christopher Gibbs was clearing his Victorian manor house under the auspices of Christie’s.

UK: WHATEVER the privations of life in the Soviet Union, one could still enjoy a simple game of chess. But because official art is turned to the use of propaganda in every dictatorship, so the more opulent chess sets in post-revolutionary Russia became a metaphor for the struggle between communists and capitalists.

UK: Loyal service brings its rewards, as this fine Queen Anne walnut bachelor’s chest, which sold at Anderson & Garland on Thursday, September 21, attests.

US: TANGIBLE Asset Galleries, the Californian art and antiques auctioneers and dealers, have pulled out of the deal to acquire Gavelnet.com, the Internet and interactive TV auction company.

UK: Eighteen months after their £52m sale of works of art from the Austrian branch of the Rothschild dynasty, Christie’s have secured a further collection, this time from the French arm of the famous banking family and estimated to fetch over £15m.

UK: English or Continental? That was the question specialist dealers and collectors were asking themselves of this mid-16th century brass candlestick which turned up at Sotheby’s oak sale at Billingshurst, Sussex on September 12 and 14

The combined hammer prices for pre-war B-movie advertising posters at auction houses these days can easily exceed the budgets allocated by the old Hollywood studios to such downmarket films.

ACADEMY Auctioneers, London, have vowed to fulfil their commitments to existing clients, despite disputes over the sale of the company.

USA: SKINNER’S auctioneers of Boston have set up a new contemporary art gallery which could do for American artists what Maurice Saatchi has done for Damien Hirst and others.

The William Foyle Library Pt. II sale at Christie’s, London last week revealed a copy of one of the rarest of all blockbooks.