Norfolk

People who change their lives by entering the trade often share something in common – they show what can be done with a passion for antiques plus drive, determination and chutzpah.

English porcelain birth tablets are unique to Lowestoft – and one of many pieces that give the factory’s wares such a profound sense of time and place.

Just three copies of the 1640, first English edition of Nicholas Machiavelli’s short treatise on political leadership have come to auction in this century, the last of them in 2005.

THE Norfolk-based auctioneers of fine modern and antique guns, Holt’s, have signed a promotional deal with Land Rover that sees them become ambassadors for the all-terrain vehicles.

This japanned lacquer case to this Georgian bracket clock was stolen from a restorer in Norfolk on October 15. The case, which had been restored, is slightly larger than is normal, accommodating a musical movement.

Whilst perhaps better known for selling reclaimed building materials, T.W. Gaze of Diss in Norfolk consistently attract lots of a more decorative nature in their five architectural sales each year. Their August 16 sale included this very fine quality early 18th century marble study of a boy holding aloft a bearded mask.

ONCE the largest city outside London, Norwich had its own silver assay office during three periods between 1565 and 1702.

For obvious reasons the Royal Doulton 'Norfolk' pattern is avidly collected in East Anglia.

The Elizabethan communion cup of St Peter-with-Bastwick, Repps, pictured right, was stolen from a safe on the weekend of January 1-2.

Thos. Wm. Gaze & Son (10% buyer’s premium)At 13in (33cm) high this really is a very good-sized example of William Moorcroft’s celebrated Hazeldene design.

ESTIMATED at £500-600 in a Keys of Aylsham sale of September 24 but very much the lot that attracted most interest – and a final bid of £10,200 – was the New Testament seen right.

SOME provincial auctioneers batten down the hatches during August, but for Keys (10% buyer's premium) in Norfolk it was a particularly busy month with two antique sales, a collectors’ auction and a picture outing.

INSCRIBED in both volumes “with the author’s love” to an Edith Barnes, presentation firsts of Lewis Carroll’s over-long children’s story Sylvie and Bruno of 1889 and its continuation or conclusion of 1893, the original red cloth bindings now uniformly faded to the spines, dampstained to the front of Vol. II and showing repairs to the spine ends of the first volume, was sold for £1400 in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of July 15.

BULKY Victorian brown furniture may be the least attractive subject at many sales, but the most expensive entry at Keys (10% buyer's premium) 1386-lot Norfolk outing on August 3-4 was a 9ft square (2.74m) mahogany library breakfront bookcase.

AS one of Keys of Aylsham's (10% buyer's premium) huge, six-a-year, sales aimed squarely at collectors, the strengths of this 1423-lot outing on June 17-18 lay in toys and militaria.

WITH giant sales every three weeks, Keys (10% buyer's premium) of Aylsham will cheerfully put two-figure lots under the hammer, but there were also a number of four-figure sellers to help swell the hammer total to £110,000 at the latest 1640-lot outing on June 2-3.

HIGHLIGHT of the Collectors’ Sale conducted by Keys (10% buyer’s premium) in Aylsham was this silver-mounted ivory flute by Monzani.

THE estimates were rather modest, but prices paid for some of the Biggles books offered as part of a May 21 sale held by Keys of Aylsham bode well for the Biggles collection that Dominic Winter are to sell on June 24. In Aylsham, Hamilton copies of The Black Peril of c.1936, in soiled blue cloth, and The Cruise of the Condor, an undated Ace series title with adverts for Spring 1937, were valued at around £40 apiece but sold for £1050 and £480 respectively.

WHILE hundreds of dealers will be heading to London in June, this weekend, from May 29 to 31, others are heading out of town to the Langley Park Spring Antiques Fair, organised at Langley Park School, Loddon, by Norfolk based Liz Allport-Lomax of Lomax Antiques Fairs.

AT Gorringes’ (15% buyer's premium) April 27-29 sale, specialist Aaron Dean was satisfied with the reaction to some 200 lots of silver but, with the market for routine tea services and so on remaining fairly moribund, it is the smaller collectables which catch the eye.