Gloucestershire

‘Wally’ birds are among the most coveted of all pieces made by the famous Martin Brothers.

Antiques dealer and fair organiser Marcus Potts is an Art Deco and early 20th century ceramics man, but he is an absolute mine of information on vintage toys.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships

Private material sourced from old estates helped Gloucestershire saleroom Chorley’s (20% buyer’s premium) get the year off to a positive start.

Music played its part in the first Dominic Winter sale of the year, with books, scores and other autograph material from another but differently sourced Elgar collection to others offered before by the saleroom.

A reminder of the dramatic drop in demand over recent decades for Victorian landscapes was evident in Gloucestershire where two such oils by Sidney Richard Percy (1822-86) went under the hammer.

A classic metaphysical fantasy novel that sold poorly when first issued but later influenced the works of CS Lewis and gained many admirers, A Voyage to Arcturus is the work of David Lindsay.

Illustrated here are two of the 20 hand-coloured litho plates, many showing the Crystal Palace in the background and each with a rhyming couplet below, that make up Blondin’s Marvellous Feats.

Complete with slightly frayed and browned but rarely seen jacket, a 1933 copy of George Orwell’s 'Down and Out in Paris and London' was bid to £46,000 by James Hall of Lucius Books in York at a Dominic Winter sale.

British bee books formed an unusual feature of a November 8 sale held by Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium).

A fine pair of Victorian figural table salts in the form of sea maidens on the back of dolphins sold for £4900 (estimate £1500-2000) at Wootton Auction Rooms in Gloucestershire on October 17. Weighing 33oz, they carry marks for John Wilmin Figg, London 1841.

It looks very tatty, but the dust jacket shown below is apparently a rare variant featuring a classic 1937 design by Alex Jardine for a 1927 first ‘Coronation’ edition of the Café Royal Cocktail Book.

Cirencester auction house Moore Allen & Innocent will offer a cache of uncensored letters written by a prominent First World War officer.