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NOT a week goes by without yet another development in the fast-moving world of digital auctions.

UK: TOP LOT in this sale was a 1668 edition of Gervase Markham’s A Way to get Wealth, a ‘nonce’ collection, first issued in 1623, which incorporates half a dozen works by this important but prolific and commercially inventive writer on agriculture, who was not averse to putting different titles to what were essentially the same works or to re-issuing unsold copies of new books under new titles.

UK: ESTIMATED at a lowly £700-900, this Aesthetic movement armchair sailed to £21,500 (plus 15 per cent premium) at the Banbury salerooms of Dreweatt Neate on March 17.

UK: THE Government has saved one of Van Dyck’s finest paintings for the nation and is blocking the export of two further paintings, a Rembrandt and a Ben Nicholson.

US: A ‘FINE & RARE’ sale held by Pacific Book Auctions on February 25 saw strong bidding for botanical plate collections, with a very rare first edition of Description des plantes nouvelles et peu connues, cultivés dans le jardin de J.M.Cels selling at $22,500 (£13,390).

FRANCE: JEAN-BAPTISTE OUDRY brought early Spring smiles to Drouot as his Maison du Jardinier (1739) pictured here, first shown at the Salon of 1740, sold to a French buyer for a world record Fr6.2m (£639,000) under the Le Blanc hammer on March 17.

UK: FOR ‘British Decorative Arts’ read ‘British Decorative Ceramics’, or at least that is the way it looked at Christie's South Kensington (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) back on March 3. They dominated this event to the extent that they accounted for four-fifths of the 419-lot auction.

- Raymond Chandler on the English US: IN MY LAST American round-up, I reported on the sale at Swanns of an early printing of the Treaty of Paris that had been owned by the Reverend Samuel Cooper of Boston, a now largely forgotten but once key political and spiritual figure in the War of Independence.

UK: NEXT year, with the beginning of a new millennium, 19th century furniture will seem far older than it actually is. But for some time now the finer pieces have been making prices comparable to their 18th century exemplars and this was certainly the case when this late 19th century satinwood and mahogany breakfront bookcase came up for sale at Heathcote Ball (10 per cent buyer’s premium) in Leicester on February 25.

Cameos Old and New by Anna M. Miller

UK: THE art trade generally classifies pictures as being either “commercial” or “academic” and it was generally the later term which best described the quality on offer at Phillips’ (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) March 19 sale of The Lloyd Collection of pictures in Oxford.

GAVELNET.COM, the San Francisco-based Internet auction specialists have denied claims that they are winding up their UK operation.

Silver prices reached their highest level for a decade last week when dealers learned that the American billionaire investor Warren Buffet had bought 20 per cent of the world's total supply.

Christie’s evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art in London was led by Claude Monet's Iris Mauves as two telephone bidders battled it out over the £6m-9m estimate until the hammer fell at £9.6m.