Collectables

This distinctive poster with its saw-edged image was created by the Polish designer Mieczyslaw Wasilewski for Brian De Palma’s classic 1987 crime thriller 'The Untouchables'.

First work in photographer’s classic coverage of China and its people makes £48,000.

Code locked in a briefcase for two decades, a finely preserved, 1997 first issue of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was finally released this summer after being delivered by its Lancashire owners into the hands of a Derbyshire saleroom.

More refined items are available in Chorley’s Cotswolds Country House sale in Prinknash Abbey on November 19-20 but few will attract more attention than this rare survivor from the early 1940s: a roll of loo paper featuring satirical cartoons of characters from Nazi Germany.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

Golf books do not bring as many really high prices as was once the case, but the most recent of the regular sales in this category held by a Californian saleroom did contain a couple of surprises.

Two books from Herman Melville’s library, both volumes of classical poetry that were annotated throughout and in one instance signed, topped a recent New York sale.

A 1547 translation into Arabic of Euclid’s Elementa Geometrica sold for £17,000 as part of an October 23 sale of Islamic and Near Eastern works on paper at Bloomsbury Auctions (25/12% buyer’s premium) on October 22,

Focusing on south-east Asia, a 90-lot map section in an Essex sale comprised the extraordinarily successful first portion of a collection of maps and charts assembled by Christopher Beresford-Jones.

The old-fashioned country house sale hardly ever fails to cause excitement. The on-the-premises sale of contents from Athelhampton House, a Tudor manor house in Puddletown, Dorset, was no exception.

‘Highly unusual’ is how the Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) cataloguer described a Second World War medal group ahead of its sale in Dorchester on August 22 for £420, just over top estimate.

Venerable London rare book dealership Bernard Quaritch, established in 1847, has recently moved from Mayfair to Holborn. Here ATG talks to two members of the firm, Andrea Mazzocchi and Donovan Rees, about its new location and some wider trends in the book trade

Pictured below is one of the 26 views, after Coke Smyth, that form a first edition copy of John Frederick Lewis’ 'Illustrations of Constantinople, Made During a Residence in that City &c., in the Years 1835-6'.

Parsonage Museum ‘determined to make the most of second opportunity’ to own miniature manuscript

It was a visit to the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino with his parents that first whetted the 15-year-old Thomas Vroom’s appetite for perspective.

Just imagine: you have been through the horrors of the Battle of Waterloo in a regiment which suffered 217 casualties out of 396, and were wounded yourself, and then your career is ended by… a wheelbarrow.