Collectables

Close to 300 lots in a recent London sale that focused mainly on private press and other illustrated books came from the library of the late Bruce Beatty, a banker whose artistic and bibliographic collecting preferences included fin de siècle literature.

Copies of Giacomo Franco’s Habiti d’huomeni et donne venetiane…, a collection of detailed views and scenes of Venetian life and costume published c.1610, vary in the numbers of plates they present.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from February 12-21, 2019.

In the latest of our occasional series of collector interviews, we talk to Penny Savill who collects irons, buttonhooks and jigsaw puzzles. She recently co-ordinated Pressing Matters, a display of irons presented by members of the British Iron Collectors group at the Art & Antiques for Everyone Fair at the NEC in November.

This Valentine’s card, below, by the French artist Xavier Sager was posted from Finland in 1917 to an address in Norway. It is priced at £15 from Val Jackson-Harris, a dealer in printed ephemera from the 18th-19th and early 20th centuries.

A “legendarily rare first edition” of the first book to describe the workings of a stock exchange sold at a high-estimate $300,000 (£238,095) in the days leading up to Christmas.

On January 10, Tennants (20% buyer’s premium) sold a single-owner collection of polar and other travel books – reported in ATG No 2376 – but the Christmas/New Year period was a busy one overall for the North Yorkshire auction house.

Dated London 1679 in a Cheffins (22.5% buyer’s premium) sale of January 10 was a job lot that included four unframed Hogarth prints, a framed royal proclamation of 1800 relating to the production of grain and a “1679 broadside, printed for T.N. that is headed A List of the Parliament of Women”.

Lots relating to explorer Matthew Flinders are particularly topical given that his grave has just been re-discovered in a graveyard under Euston station as part of works for the HS2 high-speed railway line.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from February 5-14, 2019.

Small in scale and relatively light on the purse, buttons are a rich collecting seam that many can mine.

The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association has signed up US online marketplace Biblio as chief sponsor of its flagship annual fair on June 7-9.

An auction record for a British coin was set in New York when a 1703 Vigo five guineas piece sold at $900,000 (£703,000) – $1.08m (£845,000) including premium. The sale was conducted by Baldwin’s of St James’s as part of The New York Premier Sale in Manhattan on January 13.

Historical weapons from the personal armoury of Tipu Sultan will be offered for sale in Oxfordshire in the spring.

Pistols remain one of the most popular of all categories among gun collectors and the winter sales in London proved a bumper season for handguns, from the earliest wheel-locks of the late 16th century to the semi-automatics which ushered in the modern age at the end of the 19th century.