Collectables

The parent company of recently launched Mayfair Philatelic Auctions has announced it will also be holding regular auctions of books and prints, writes Roland Arkell.

It was in December 2014 that Sotheby’s put an estimate of £100,000-150,000 on what it called at the time “probably the most famous and evocative illustration of the 20th century”.

A beautifully preserved 1937 first state copy of Tolkien’s 'The Hobbit' sold for £35,000 at Forum Auctions.

The Wassenaar Zoo in Den Haag opened its doors in 1937 and closed in 1985, but its wonderful library, essentially untouched since the 1970s, has only now come to auction in London.

Written in red ink on four sheets, the original draft script of Ronnie Barker’s famous ‘Fork Handles’ TV sketch of 1976 has been sold for £28,000.

Shown below is one of 20 hand-coloured plates from 'Masken des Römischen Carnevals'. This was a rare and separate 1790 Weimar issue of the plates that illustrated a work by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on Roman carnivals published the previous year – an item that is itself a great rarity*.

Bid to a record €18,000 (£15,660) in a May 15-17 series of sales held by Reiss & Sohn (18% buyer’s pemium) of Königstein, near Frankfurt, was a first edition of Immanuel Kant’s 'Critik der reinen Vernunft'.

It was a four-page Mozart manuscript of an unfinished Allegro in G for piano and four hands that led the Sotheby’s (25/10/12.9% buyers’ premium) sales of May 22.

Echoes of Lincolnshire’s history in the hugely lucrative late medieval wool trade, this wool weight, below, probably from the 16th century, was the star item at John Taylors’ (18% buyer’s premium) appropriately named Wool Mart auction rooms in Louth.

In the early development of motion pictures, this Kinora viewer, below, was the high end of the hugely popular ‘flip-book’ film machines.