News

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

The London art market breathed a general sigh of relief last week after Sotheby’s and Christie’s Part I Impressionist and Modern sales belied the atmosphere of economic uncertainty with a clutch of high prices for classic works by the major names of late 19th and early 20th century art.

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).

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.

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).