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LIKE many other provincial auctioneers, the Bath operation of the Phillips empire – now the centre for collection points at Cardiff, Bristol and Sherborne, profited from the major fairs in June when their 332-lot sale on May 21 saw a take-up of 83 per cent and a predominance of trade buyers buying to sell on in London.

Foot and Mouth continues to ravage the businesses of Cumbria, but local private buyers and dealers had the capital to make a sizeable contribution to this monthly sale on the county’s west coast at Mitchells, Cockermouth.

UK: STANDING out from all the three-figure bids at this 412-lot dispersal at D.M Nesbit & Company on June 13, the £1000-plus results again underlined the trade’s willingness to fork out only on what dealers believe will sell quickly.

For last November’s Asia series Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10 per cent buyer’s premium) switched from holding mammoth mixed Oriental offerings to more specialised separate Chinese and Japanese sales – an arrangement they continued for the summer Asian sales last month.

Now that we cannot take what is left of our public services for granted, it is worth remembering that municipal fire brigades have only existed nationwide since 1938. When private brigades were the norm, the residents of towns and cities had to rely on firemen employed by private insurance companies, resulting in the bizarre sight of Commercial Union/Sun Life/Phoenix firemen idling in front of a blazing building insured by a rival company.

Bonhams & Brooks (15/10% buyer’s premium) held their Far Eastern Works of Art on May 30, a couple of weeks earlier than the other main auction houses.

Illustrated is one of Lord Frederic Leighton’s most famous compositions Flaming June. This 41/2in by 41/4in colour sketch for the painting was understandably one of the sensations of Sotheby’s dispersal of the Leverhulme Collection at Thornton Manor, Merseyside, on June 26-28.

FRANCE: A trio of Paris summer high season auctions which Sothebys are staging jointly with Paris auctioneers Poulain Le Fur got off to a Fr64m (£6.2m) start last week with the sale of the contents of the Monaco apartment of the Italian collectors and dealers M et Mme Luigi Laura on June 27.

This dramatic theatrical costume for a warrior in yellow satin with gilt thread and silk embroidery took the top price in a sale of Asian Costume and Textiles held by Christie’s South Kensington on June 21.

VANDALS are being blamed for a fire that threatened to engulf Eastbourne Auction Rooms last week.

UK: A COLLECTION of carte-de-visite photographs and signatures of leading figures of the Confederacy – the South’s leader, Jefferson Davis, and military leaders, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, among them – assembled by a Captain Busby of the Calypso, an English blockade runner, was one of more competitively contested lots in this Sussex sale. The collection was finally knocked down at £3000 to Julian Browning.

US: ROBERT Eldred’s March 30-31 sale of Americana in East Dennis (Massachusetts) included what they first saw as a 2ft 11in (89cm) wide “mahogany Sheraton-style one-drawer console table”, consigned from a local, Cape Cod estate and valued at $250-350.

UK: IT HAS just been announced exclusively to the Antiques Trade Gazette that the Heberden Coin Room at the Ashmolean Museum, which holds one of the most comprehensive collections of coins and medals in the world, has received a very substantial grant to update and rewrite the history of Greek coins from their invention (c.630BC) to Alexander the Great (d.323BC).

A single leaf from a 1455 Gutenberg Bible, in a copy of Alfred E. Newton’s A Noble Fragment of 1921 sold at Bloomsbury Book Auctions on June 8 for £15,000 (+ 15 per cent buyer's premium).

UK: WRITTEN shortly after 1290, perhaps for a practising lawyer and presumably by professional scribes – it exhibits a variety of neat English cursive and charter hands – the manuscript copy of Magna Carta and the Statutes of England illustrated right is a remarkable example of an English medieval secular book.

US: TWO early American longcase clocks with much higher expectations failed to sell in a Freemans Americana sale of April 20, but the inlaid mahogany shelf clock pictured left doubled its estimate to sell for $23,000 (£16,430).

Dan Dare, pilot of the Future, makes his first appearance in the 1950 first issue of Eagle comic, alongside which is a 1953 Dan Dare Book of Jet Planes, with 3-D viewer. These were sold by Comic Book Postal Auctions, London, on June 12 for £248 & £130, respectively (+ 10 per cent buyer's premium).

US: THIS 10in (25.5cm) high painted wood figure of an Egyptian offering bearer was described as Middle Kingdom, Dynasty XII in an antiquities sale held by Sloans in their Washington DC rooms on May 9.

UK: A DOUBLE catalogue of prints, and maps saw many failures – nearly half of the 224 lots that made up the May sale of Old Master, sporting and decorative prints, plus photographs and drawings – but a selection from what might be termed the “better half” appears below.

UK: FOLLOWING on from the success of the International section of the Seeger Collection in New York last month, high quality and low estimates once again proved a winning combination for Sotheby’s (20/15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) when on June 14 they offered works by British artists collected by Stanley Seeger over the last 20 or so years.