West Sussex

More than £35,000 worth of Modern British art from a single-owner collection sold at Bellmans (22% buyer’s premium) in Winchester on June 27-28.

St Augustine of Hippo’s De civitate Dei (below) was penned to counter pagan claims that what had prompted the Visigoth sacking of Rome in 410 was the adoption of Christianity by its emperors. The book was first printed around a thousand years later in the 1460s, but it was 150 years before a first English language edition appeared.

Jackie Edwards knows all about crowds, as she is in her third year of running a busy biannual antiques and vintage fair in five indoor/outdoor locations throughout the market town of Romsey in Hampshire.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

A hundred and eighty lots in a recent West Sussex sale that offered great variety and some real rarities came from the library at West Horsley Place in Surrey.

The emperor Qianlong collected Western clocks throughout his 60-year reign, building upon the interest of his grandfather Kangxi.

Whether you’re in the market for mammoths or missiles, for 10 years Summers Place Auctions has been a likely destination. In 2008 SPA held its first auction, having been formed the year before.

Petworth Park Antiques & Fine Art Fair is bigger than ever this year as it returns for its fourth staging.

Henry Wynne (fl.1654-1709), master of the Clockmaker’s Company, produced the finest and largest double-horizontal sundials of the Restoration period.

A first English edition of Charlotte Bernhardi’s translation of her father, Admiral Krusenstern’s Memoir… of his 1803-06 circumnavigation of the globe was one of the rarer items offered at Toovey’s (24.5% buyer’s premium) on February 20.

Paul Comolera (1818-97) was one of a series of prominent sculptors who travelled to work in Stoke-on-Trent at a time of political upheaval in France.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

“The selling price was really encouraging,” said Chichester auctioneer Peter Parker after an 18th century walnut chest made £5800, “but it just emphasises how polarised the market is between the top end and the rest.”

Outsold, predictably enough, by an 18th-19th century Chinese vase, two late 19th century Persian moulded pottery tiles were the eye-catchers among a buoyant Asian works of art section at Billingshurst auction house Bellmans (22% buyer’s premium).

Marked CRA and dated 1895, a set of three silver spoons offered at auction represent a key point in the career of one of the giants of the Arts & Crafts movement, Charles Robert Ashbee (1863-1942).

Galloway Antiques Fairs returns for its second edition at the Midhurst stately home Cowdray House this year.