UK

UK: BONHAMS and Brooks are to close their Manchester saleroom, compress departments in London and make 15 staff redundant in the first major shake-up since the two companies merged in September.

UK: IN THE days when thousands of game birds would be shot in a morning on the moors by the likes of Walsingham and Ripon, it might have come as a shock to learn that no records of this gun ever making a successful kill existed, even more so when the target was many thousand times the size of your average pheasant.

THE flooded Welsh Marches in November didn’t augur well for sales but the Herefordshire auctioneers even managed to find a buyer for a highly unseasonal garden seat.

UK: THE market in Guinness collectables continues to be as thirsty as that for the black stuff itself, to the point where buyers have to be on guard against forgeries of better known pieces.

LONDON: SOTHEBY’S have signed a five-year lease to open a new 54,000 sq ft year-round saleroom at Olympia in west London from June next year. The first sale is expected to take place in September.

A protracted telephone duel saw this striking early 17th century, Roman inlaid marble and hardstone table top go from a starting bid of £500,000 to a final price of £1,030,000 to top Sotheby’s Continental Furniture sale in London on December 13.

UK: AGNEW’S are set to open a new gallery for Contemporary art in Old Bond Street in January.

UPPINGHAM treen dealer Wendy Grindley celebrated the first anniversary of her founding of Rutland Antiques Fair on November 19 with the launch of a 50-dealer event at Barnsdale Country Club, overlooking Rutland Water.

UK: NEWMARKET auctioneers Vost’s say they expect to cease trading within the month after managing director John Vost quit in what he described as a “major boardroom disagreement”.

Imagine being serenaded at your dinner table, preferably by one of the Python team, with the world’s smallest playable violin.

A HOUSE of Lords ruling in a copyright case tightening the rules on what constitutes an infringement could have a significant impact on the Contemporary art scene.

THE parliamentary committee assessing the merits of the Kent Bill have called on the Government to introduce public legislation to cover the whole country instead.

DETAILS of the planned development of Sotheby’s UK salerooms announced in last week’s Antiques Trade Gazette are unlikely to become clear before mid-December at the earliest.

UK: The absence of a buyer’s premium at Nigel Ward & Co’s sale on November 18 at Ewyas Harold Memorial Hall near Pontrilas, Hereford was certainly a factor in the substantial price attained for this Charles II pewter candlestick, 7in (18cm) by an unknown Bristol maker.

This Regency giltwood chair may have been one of the largest hearing aids ever built, but it was intended to serve the same purpose as the smallest, mobile device: disguising the disablity and sparing the dignity of the listener.

DEALERS in the Dover area have contacted the Antiques Trade Gazette to complain about a local police initiative asking them to fingerprint their customers.

UK: FOUR weeks of expert evidence and deliberation has ended with the Parliamentary Select Committee needing the chairman’s casting vote to keep the Kent Bill from being thrown out.

UK: Lot 1098 at the Leominster rooms of Brightwells auctioneers offered the clock trade the chance to purchase this rare late 18th century bracket clock by Thomas Berry of Ormskirk, 2ft 7in by 17in (79 x 43cm).

Sold at Sotheby’s, London sale (October 12-13) for £6500 was a rare example of a printed version of one of the letters exchanged by Napoleon and the Sherif of Mekkah, Ghalib ibn Musa’id, at the time of the French invasion of Egypt in 1798-99.

UK: The Voyage of H.M.S Beagle is a summary of fauna discovered by Charles Darwin on his travels through the Southern Hemisphere from 1831-6, and became crucial to the formulation of his brutal creed: “survival of the fittest”.