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SALES to overseas buyers now account for 63 per cent of business among members of the British Antique Dealers Association, according to BADA’s latest survey for 1999/2000.

OPENING up the auction scene to a wider audience has long been the aim of many involved in the business. Leading provincial auctioneers Dreweatt Neate are continuing to do their bit with a new series of saleroom talks aimed at the uninitiated.

A classic entry in Christie's South Kensington's Classic Arts and Crafts sale on May 2 provided one of the day’s top results – £6800 for this pair of 2ft x 12in (61 x 31cm) c.1900 stained glass panels decorated with mediaeval landscapes and a text inscription.

It may look like a cross between an ancient rolodex and a tinpot bandstand but this is actually a rather stylish piece of late Victorian heavy industrial equipment.

UK: Somehow it still happens. After all the years of the Roadshow and other TV programmes on antiques, all the glossy magazine articles and all the newspaper columns, people still junk what seem obviously valuable materials, like this set of three Victorian stained glass panels.

In the past ten years, there have been only five or six first edition copies of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at auction, and not since 1991 have we seen a copy in the original boards*.

Devon auctioneers’ Rendells mammoth 2000-lot sale saw keen interest and strong prices for a selection of horological pieces.

FORMER Sotheby’s chief executive Diana D. Brooks will now be sentenced on November 19 for her part in the auction house price fixing scandal.

UK: This sixth-plate image of the Japanese sailor Sentaro, nicknamed Sam Patch, was a top priced entry in a successful section of early Daguerreotypes offered at Christie’s South Kensington on May 11.

UK: London and Cotswold dealers secured the lion’s share of the top lots at Holloways’ antique sale in Banbury on April 25.

JUST two days after moving operations to new premises at Coleridge House, Shaddongate, Carlisle, the recently retitled firm Thomson Roddick & Medcalf celebrated with a special book sale and took a bid of £17,500 for one of the privately printed subscriber copies of Seven Pillars of Wisdom issued in 1926.

LEADING provincial auctioneers Dreweatt Neate are to host an unusual tribute next month – an auction that recreates a sale held at Kimbolton Castle on June 24, 1949.

UK: THE football season may now have ended but back on April 24 when the Chester rooms of Phillips (15 per cent buyer’s premium) held their bi-annual sporting sale the season was at its height.

UK: AS with spoons, silver takes on an extra glow in the currently buoyant market for tea caddies an example of which came up at the April 26/27 sale at Taunton held by Greenslade Taylor Hunt’s (15% buyer’s premium).

USA: INCUNABULA offered as part of the April 26 sale of Early Printed Books at Swanns were not in the Friedlaender class, but the top lots did include two books from the press of Gunther Zainer, Augsburg’s first printer.

– 10 year delay on full implementation – £7600 cap on maximum levy. The final conditions under which droit de suite is likely to be introduced to Britain were revealed last week when hard-won concessions, rejected by the European Parliament last December, were substantially re-instated at a meeting of the permanent representatives in Brussels.

Robin Day shot to fame as the winner of MoMA’s international low-cost furniture competition in 1948, but the bidding for a pair of Forum Lounge chairs, one shown, in the Post-War section of the sale at Phillips Edinburgh (15% buyer’s premium) on April 27 was anything but subdued.

UK: This month has been a vintage one for photographic images in the UK, with over £4.5m netted between the four sales held in London and Exeter at Sotheby’s, CSK and Bearnes between May 10 and 12.

UK: TRADITIONAL silver may be a dull market, but make the metal decorative, like the pair of London, 1860 candelabra offered at Peter Wilson auctioneers in Nantwich, Cheshire, and it will shine.

UK: Chillingham Castle, Northumberland, is the usual venue for Jim Railton's, Gosforth, spring sale, but the predations of Foot and Mouth meant that it had to be relocated to one of the smarter districts of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.