Collectables

The man himself may have disappeared in 1974 but a series of cheques showing Lord Lucan’s spiralling gambling debts have now emerged and will be offered at auction later this month.

An important collection of early chess pieces will be offered as part of Sotheby’s Islamic sale in London on April 20.

John Wood the Elder’s (1704-54) set of drawing instruments were offered at Clevedon Auction Rooms earlier this month and were bought by the Bath Preservation Trust for £21,000.

A previously unrecorded copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio has emerged at Christie’s. Estimated at £800,000-1.2m, it will lead a specially-staged auction in May comprising just four lots – a copy of each of the first four Shakespeare folios.

Auction houses selling wine, whisky and other alcoholic drinks to other businesses face criminal convictions and fines up to £10,000 if they fail to register for a new HMRC scheme that aims to police the sale of alcohol to retailers and capture an estimated £1.2bn in unpaid tax.

An original example of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic sold for €185,000 at Whyte’s of Dublin yesterday. Estimated at €150,000-250,000, the document published by the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army was one of only 40-50 known copies left in existence and it drew competition from two phone bidders, one from Ireland and the other from the US who ended up as the successful buyer.

Specialist taxidermy dealer Alexis Turner has lost a significant portion of his stock following an extraordinary raid on a London warehouse.

The highlight of Bainbridges latest sale in West Ruislip was a 1560 Geneva Bible which sold for £8500.

Dix Noonan Webb have achieved the second highest price for a George Cross just eight months after selling the GC awarded to the secret agent Violette Szabo for a record £260,000.

The auditors for Stanley Gibbons, the venerable collectables dealership and parent company of Dreweatts Bloomsbury, Mallett and AH Baldwin, have resigned because they believe the firm is exposed to excessive risk.

Cased fish, once the only acceptable face of the taxidermy market, have cooled since the 1990s when prices in excess of £3000 were commonplace.

A Steinway grand piano sold for a double-estimate £95,000 on February 24 when Christie’s King Street held a £3m, 146-lot sale of items from the former Queen Anne’s Gate home of musician Sting and his wife Trudie Styler.

According to various press reports, authorities in the province of Hunan in China are offering 10,000 yuan (£1000) to anyone who can decipher the inscriptions on the back of six gold coins from ancient India.

Two of the best-known anthropomorphic creations of the celebrated Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter (1835-1918) resurfaced at Treadway Toomey in Oak Park, near Chicago, Illinois, on February 6.

A 1957 Ferrari 355 S Scaglietti sold at the Artcurial Motorcars auction for €32.1m (£24.7m) with premium to an international collector after “a tense, 11-minute bidding battle”.

A previously unknown seventh edition of the Bay Psalm Book, published in Boston, 1693, with a provenance tied to Salem witch trial judge Jonathan Corwin and descendants of John Proctor, sold for $221,000 (£151,584) at a Swann sale in New York on February 4.

A new auction high for a ski poster was established at Christie’s South Kensington’s annual Ski sale, held on January 21, when this 1934 colour lithograph advertising the attractions of the Swiss resort of Gstaad sold for £62,000 (plus premium).

Information has come to light proving that a newly-discovered flag due to sell at auction in March was not that flown from HMS Leviathan at the Battle of Trafalgar. It has since been withdrawn from sale.

A museum in Switzerland has acquired this extraordinary monkey band automaton at an online-only auction conducted by East Bristol Auctions, in Hanham, Bristol.

The Law Commission, the independent body which reviews laws in England and Wales, have recommended to the government that the term ‘antique firearm’ be defined in statute for the first time.