Collectables

WILTSHIRE auctioneers Netherhampton Salerooms were celebrating a new house record on March 3 after a disbound album of Far Eastern topographical drawings sold for £43,000.

THE 1953 FA Cup Final will forever be known as the Matthews Final.It was while playing for Blackpool against Bolton Wanderers that the legendary winger Sir Stanley Matthews (1915-2000) gave his career-defining performance and won the only major honour of a long career.

ACTION Comics ushered in the age of superheroes when its first issue hit the news stands in June 1938. On its cover was a curious character dressed in skintight blue and red lifting a green Chevrolet above his head, and the course of American pop culture was changed forever.

Last month in Harrogate, auctioneers Morphets held a sale of what is thought to be the biggest collection of vintage railway posters ever to come on the market.

INTERNATIONAL Coin Exchange, a new firm of Dublin-based auctioneers, will hold their first sale on February 19.

BLOOMSBURY Auctions and Dreweatts have announced an alliance with Hermann Historica, the German specialist auctioneers in arms, armour and militaria.

A PENCIL and watercolour sketch showing men at work on a celebrated escape tunnel was a major attraction in a log or record compiled in 1943-45 by a Scottish P.O.W. sold by Lyon & Turnbull of Edinburgh for £3200 on January 13.

WHEN St John Price bought his first sycamore and penwork box from Halcyon Days in Brook Street, London for £30 in 1966, the term Mauchline ware was yet to be invented.

SPECIALIST dealers believe fake medals from the XXIXth Olympiad in Beijing are appearing for sale on eBay.

A COPY of A Christmas Carol has now knocked Oliver Twist off the top of the tree to become the most expensive Dickens title ever sold at auction.

THE two museums hoping to provide a home for the Staffordshire hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold will be asking arts charities and other funding bodies to pay for it.

THE Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft has reportedly paid nearly £1.5m for the only double Victoria Cross awarded during the First World War.

AUCTIONEERS across the country have recently been the recipients of this potentially interesting document, a copy of The Order of Service for the Funeral of Sir Winston Churchill, 30th January 1965.

AMONG the more run-of-the-mill furnishings that constitute the bulk of the popular Interiors sales at Christie’s South Kensington, there are often a handful of more quirky items.

FROM May 1913, the first distinctive Commonwealth of Australia banknotes were issued. They were controversial in that no portrait of the reigning monarch, George V, was included in the design.

MORE than a year after his county court victory against Royal Mail, coins and banknotes dealer Bruce Goulborn is taking them to court again.

METASTASIS, to most people, is a word with rather grim connotations – referring as it does to the spread of cancer. Applied to a set of playing cards, however, it has an altogether different and more attractive meaning.

THIS rare c.1912 Märklin fire engine toy topped the sale of the second part of the Donald Kaufman toy collection at specialist saleroom Bertoia Auctions in Vineland, New Jersey, on September 25-26.

BORN a wealthy European aristocrat and court painter to a Turkish Sultan, the Maltese count Vittorio Amadeo Preziosi (1816-1882) was nevertheless a familiar figure among the back streets of Istanbul.

THIS German clockwork tinplate limousine made a surprise £38,000 at Tennants of Leyburn at their latest toy sale.