News

UK: ONE CHART was very creased and there was a stain on the frontispiece that penetrated to the title page and early leaves, but the copy of Bligh’s Narrative of the Mutiny on [the...] Bounty offered in Carlisle was a tightly bound copy of the 1790 first edition in a contemporary binding of quarter calf and marbled boards, and it sold at £3150.

UK: AFFIRMING its place as the London fair which reaches the parts other fairs do not reach, the winter version of the thrice-yearly Decorative Antiques and Textiles Fair, held in its trademark marquee in Battersea Park, SW11 from January 16 to 21, once again made its distinctive mark among the first fairs of the year.

FRANCE: Venezia Fodaco dei Turghi, Carlo Naya’s moonlit view of the Grand Canal (c.1870), headed the Baron-Ribeyre photo sale on December 19. The albumen print, 161/2 x 21in (41 x 53cm), was dubbed in perfect condition and raced to a treble-estimate Fr55,000 (£5200).

Modern ceramics in keen demand by collectors and dealers UK: A HIGH turnover of £500-1000 lots in Lawrences' auction of Antique Furniture and Effects on December 5, 6 and 7 contributed more to the £255,000 sale total than any individual high-value entries on a day when, unusually at a provincial sale, the strongest prices came for ceramics – British, Oriental and European – rather than for the furniture entries.

FRANCE: A LOUIS XVI mahogany gueridon with three scrolled legs, stamped Molitor, sold to the French trade in Dijon on December 9 for Fr1.6m (£150,000), five times estimate – even though the table was in indifferent condition, having been recovered from a local attic.

US: DESCRIBED as “probably as good or better than any copy at auction in the last five years”, a 1951 first of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the cloth binding extremely clean and the dust jacket in “nearly superb” condition, made $7500 (£5170) in the December 18 sale held by the Baltimore Book Company.

US: THE PIRACY collection mentioned above was not the only sale held by Christie’s East on December 12. Three important Hemingway lots which formed part of a general sale are described below, and in Antiques Trade Gazette No. 1472 I featured works by Ayn Rand, among them two works on Hollywood, published whilst she was still a young woman in Russia, which sold well.