Collectables

In the campaign furniture market, provenance and an interesting story behind the owner are important.

Highly influential three-volume set on maths takes a record £90,000 sum in London

What could be more British than a policeman in traditional garb standing on Tower Bridge?

After 60 years in an attic, an extremely rare battery-operated Machine Man robot with its original box rolled into the spotlight at Morphy in Denver, Pennsylvania.

It was not in the best of conditions, but an unusual cartographic lot in an August 6 sale at Thomson Roddick (17.5% buyer’s premium) of Carlisle sold at £420.

Florence Nightingale was a name that figured prominently among the 130 lots of books and ephemera offered as part of a September 2 sale in Shrewsbury.

A collection of bicycles spanning a century from 1892-1982, Tour de France jerseys and other sporting memorabilia will be offered for sale by Ivoire Chartres in the French city on October 17.

A small group of Victorian transfer-printed stoneware crocks offered by Taylor’s (24% buyer’s premium) in Montrose on September 16 included a 7½in (18cm) butter crock with the logo of the Lothians Dairy Co of Slate Ford Road, Edinburgh.

This pastoral scene titled 'Where is this bower beside the silver Thames?' features on a poster to promote the London Underground by the well-known French Art Deco artist Jean Dupas.

Collection of hotelier, broadcaster and food writer includes many early works.

Essex saleroom disperses superb pipe collection amassed over more than 50 years.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

The white ‘rooks’ to this 19th century carved and turned wood chess set, offered by TW Gaze (18% buyer’s premium) in Diss in August 12, are stamped Calvert 189 Fleet Street to their bases.

An October 27-30 sale of more than 2800 lots at Reiss & Sohn of Königstein-im-Taunus includes a 1583 first of Georg Bartisch’s Opthalmodouleia…, a famous work on eye surgery that is also the first extensively illustrated account of any surgical speciality.

The invention of the gauger’s slide rule in the 1680s is generally credited to one Thomas Everard of Southampton.