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Atlanta-based WorthPoint, an online database and social network for antiques and collectibles, have announced its intent to acquire GoAntiques, the online buying and selling network.

Every year English Heritage's open days offer free access to thousands of properties that are usually closed to the public. This year’s opportunity runs from September 11 to 14, and from a list of 3500 places there are two of particular interest to students of Arts & Crafts, one in Devon, the other in Surrey.

A DIARY kept by a sailor in Nelson’s navy was offered for sale in a US auction earlier this month. Given that diaries kept by ordinary sailors are exceptionally rare, there was huge interest in this visually striking document from both sides of the Atlantic with institutions, the trade and private collectors vying for the journal.

Phillips de Pury are holding the first ever auction of hip hop jewellery on October 1 in New York. The sale, titled Hip Hop's Crown Jewels will offer some serious bling worn by some of the music movement's biggest stars.

Bonhams are to sell the contents of Great Brampton House, Herefordshire, home to the antiques business of long-standing dealer Lady Pidgeon. The sale will take place on October 1 onsite in the grounds of the estate and will feature over 700 lots of furniture, works of art, Asian ceramics and paintings.

The Reserve Bank of Australia are to challenge eBay on their decision to make PayPal mandatory on all sales listings. The RBA says it will “shortly be holding discussions with PayPal [an eBay subsidiary] with a view to seeking the removal of these rules”.

THE Standsted Mountfitchet saleroom Sworders are to sell the contents of Lancotbury Manor, a timber-framed Tudor manor house near Dunstable that was the former home of David Cochrane and Bernard Gulley.

Tiffany & Co have appealed over the ruling that eBay do not have to police their auction site for fakes before they are sold to unwitting buyers.

AT Sotheby's on July 17, a wooden file box containing nearly 4000 index cards compiled by the father of professional forensic pathology, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, sold at £15,000 to a collector.

The FBI are attempting to track down the rightful owners of 137 works of art, discovered in a New York apartment, which are thought to have been stolen in the 1960s and 70s.

A previously unheard tape of a Beatles recording session, in which John Lennon and Paul McCartney break into giggles and crack jokes, has fetched £10,000 at Cameo auctioneers in Midgham, Berkshire.

Stolen art and antiques valued at tens of millions of pounds remain at large despite the incarceration of five members of the notorious Johnson family who bragged in a 2005 BBC documentary that they would gladly steal from “the lords, the sirs and the ladies”.

Isle of Wight firm Island Auction Rooms established a new record for a clock sold by a UK provincial auctioneer when this remarkable longcase took £240,000 on August 7.

SOTHEBY’S dependence on the contemporary art market could hardly be clearer than in their latest set of figures.

Christie’s have announced that they are to sell the multi-million collection of Yves St Laurent, who died in June, and his business partner Pierre Bergé in February next year.

This Carrs of Carlisle biscuit tin looks like pretty much any other Christmas biscuit tin from 1941 – except that it happens to be unopened.

CHRISTIE’S first wine sale in Asia for seven years will take place in November after the auctioneers have decided to reintroduce wine auctions in Hong Kong.

A MAJOR loan exhibition of early works by Lucian Freud (b.1922) will run from October 9 to December 12 at the St James’s gallery of Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 38 Bury Street, London SW1.

An unidentified culprit used counterfeit cash to purchase an item in an auction of general antiques at Peter Francis Auctioneers of West Wales on July 15.

Maurice Collins and the British Library are to hold a display of Weird and Wonderful Inventions and Gadgets, eccentric and ingenious contraptions produced between 1851 and 1951.