News

THE London fairs season gets seriously underway on June 7 with the opening of the The Fine Art and Antiques Fair, which runs at Olympia until June 17.

– 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.

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.

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.

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*.

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.

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.