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A prayerbook presented by Louis XV to Maria Leczinska as a wedding present in 1725 sold at Sotheby’s (23.92/14.35% buyer’s premium) for €280,000 (£200,000) on December 2, during an otherwise disappointing 194-lot royal provenance sale that brought €1.26m (£900,000) and was 72 per cent sold by value, but just 56 per cent by lot.

The main head-turner at the Hove sale held by Scarborough Perry Fine Arts (15% buyer’s premium) on December 2-3 was this striking 19th century Italian, gold-mounted tortoiseshell snuffbox with a finely executed micromosaic lid, right.

WHEN the first part of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha was published in Madrid in 1605, it proved an immediate success, but as the original publisher, Francisco de Robles, had failed to register copyright outside his native Castile, others were quick to jump on the Cervantes bandwagon.

Richardson & Smith, Whitby, November 18 Buyer’s premium: 12.5 per cent Furniture produced the top lots in this routine 717-lot North Yorkshire auction, topped by an oak dresser and a plate rack with a shaped crest over four tiers.

An unusual picture, both in terms of its style and quality, was the star of the show at this year’s Fine Paintings sale held by the Scottish auctioneers John Swan (10% buyer’s premium) at Dryburgh Abbey Hotel near St Boswells on December 2.

Nadar (1820-1910), real name Félix Tournachon, is best known as one of the leading specialists in early photographic portraits.

NEVER forget there is another armory in Manhattan, the one downtown at Lexington Avenue at 26th Street, and that one hosts some splendid shows throughout the year, starting in 2005 with the appropriately named Antiques at the Armory from January 21 to 23.

IN CONTRAST to Sotheby’s and Christie’s, who usually offer Japanese arms and armour in Japanese works of art sales, Bonhams (19.5/10% buyers premium) include theirs as a section in militaria auctions.

Despite a year that saw no recovery in prices for brown furniture and problematic levels of demand for ‘bread and butter’ pictures and table silver, several of the UK’s top provincial auctioneers enjoyed record turnover figures in 2004.

ANDREW McIntosh Patrick, director of The Fine Art Society, is to sell his celebrated collection of metalwork by the Victorian industrial designer Christopher Dresser. Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull will conduct the projected £400,000 sale on April 19.

THE V&A has appealed for help from the art and antiques world in tracing the eight bronze plaques thought to be worth a total of £450,000 stolen in the third raid on the museum in three months.

A Christie’s South Kensington sports sale of November 23 saw a bid of £5500 on a programme for the 1897 F.A. Cup Final at Crystal Palace in which Aston Villa completed a League and Cup double by beating Everton 3-2.

AS recently as a decade ago, the Pennsylvanian Impressionists or New Hope School – perhaps the most recognisable group of painters to emerge from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) – remained a relatively untapped seam for ‘serious’ auctioneers of the Mid-Atlantic States.

THE US is not the only North American country notching up record totals for auctions of its own domestically-produced art. On November 25 at Toronto’s Park Hyatt Hotel, just a week before Sotheby’s achieved the first ever nine-figure total for a sale of American art, the Vancouver-based auctioneers Heffel Fine Art (15% buyer’s premium) held the highest-ever grossing sale of Fine Canadian Art.

STROHMENGER’s stylish Art Deco pianos are self-evidently pieces with huge crossover appeal. Being chic furnishings as well as useful musical instruments, they tend to give strong performances in the saleroom when they appear.

Executed in the 1890s, when Beatrix Potter was working for the greetings card firm Hildesheimer, this little ink and watercolour drawing was last seen at auction in London about ten year ago, but on December 1 it came back to Christie’s South Kensington and sold for £25,000.

THE wrappers are torn and creased, the spine has been repaired with glue and several plates and text leaves are loose, but the book seen right is an 1858 first edition of perhaps the scarcest of all American fishing books, Fishing with Hook and Line... by ‘Frank Forester’, the pseudonym used by that prolific chronicler of hunting, shooting and fishing, Henry William Herbert.

THE Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association has hit back at criticism levelled at the trade in a court case involving a serial thief of valuable maps.

“In 20 years I have never seen anything quite like it,” says auctioneer Richard Bromell of Sherborne’s Charterhouse. “It has a central dial for Greenwich which is surrounded by 11 smaller dials telling the time in the various countries. Having originally been presented to a Victorian relative [of the vendors] who built railways for a living, he would have been able to keep track of time with all his business interests.”

A 90-year-old member of the Wine Label Circle has lost 70 items from his collection during a break-in at his East Sussex home. The wine labels were the only items taken in the theft.