Collectables

UK: A VOLUME containing a dozen reports, tracts and pamphlets relating to the 18th century trial of a local man, Aylsham lawyer Christopher Layer, went to Jarndyce at £400 in this first Aylsham sale of the year.

UK: THE Travel sale held by Sotheby’s on December 14 included a fine collection of what are known as ‘Lafreri-School’ maps, the product of a remarkable flowering of cartographic arts that took place in Rome and Venice, c.1540-70.

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.

UK: THE FIRST Tolkiens of 2001 combined to add £11,000 to the takings at this Bath sale.

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.

The Catalogue of Silver in the Grosvenor Museum, Chester by Peter Boughton, published by Phillimore & Co, Chichester. Available from the museum on 01244 402008 fax: 01244 347587 or bookshops. ISBN 186077153X £19.95 pb.

FRANCE: THIS Heures de la Vierge manuscript, from Auvergne or the Lyon area (c.1485) fetched Fr215,000 (£20,5000) at Bondu on December 22. This Book of Hours (Use of Rome), 61/2 x 61/2in (17cm x 17cm), had a tired 16th century brown morocco binding but contained 14 full-page paintings influenced by Jean Colombe and artists from Bourges, and many of its 131 leaves (from a probable 135) had decorative borders with flowers, strawberries, fabulous creaturs and acanthus leaves.

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: A SCIENTIFIC library formed by New York businessman Joseph A. Frielich was sold by Sotheby’s New York for $10.7m (£7.2m) on January 10-11, 2001, and among many lots that made much higher than predicted sums was a magnificent copy of Albertus Seba’s Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri...

UK: ARTS Minister Alan Howarth has announced that the Government will pay £125,000 compensation to a family forced to sell a painting as they fled the Nazis.

UK: WELCOME as the activity of interior decorators is on today’s auction scene, it was still a little surprising to note the interest that some took in this 1950s butcher boy’s bicycle, right, offered at the Scarborough sale held by David Duggleby (10per cent buyer’s premium) on December 4.

UK: CLOSE to 640 lots were packed into the catalogue of the last Bloomsbury sale of the old year – half of them scientific and medical – but compared with the sale of the previous week, reported in Antiques Trade Gazette No. 1473, four-figure bids were few and far between.

UK: TWO days of selling in the niche sporting memorabilia market resulted in something of a score draw for specialists Mullock Madeley.

UK: “THAT is a heck of a lot of beverage, even for me,” said one dealer looking over the 64 lots of tea and coffee pots, some shown here, at Phillips (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) sale in Bury St. Edmunds on December 6-7.

FINE wine is one of those areas of the auction market which is bound to catch a cold if the world economy sneezes into recession or slowdown over the coming months. Higher than usual unsold rates at recent auctions in London and New York would suggest that buyers are already taking a more selective view of the wine market.

YAHOO have decided to ban sales of Nazi memorabilia and other items promoting racism from their Website from January 10.

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.

FRANCE: THREE French museums have become embroiled in legal controversy after harbouring works of art looted from their original owners during the Nazi occupation of France during World War II.

NEW YORK: PIRACY on the High Seas may be among the most dastardly of criminal activities, but when you look back at the Spanish Main with all its swashbuckling and early Hollywood Fairbanks and Flynn connotations, it remains among the most stirring and romantic.

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