North America

Ahead of the autumn sale of a star lot, Phillips' watch expert Aurel Bacs tells ATG why the time is right for the firm to expand its US watch business

One of the odder lots I have stumbled across in the many June book sales is a worn and soiled 12pp autograph catalogue, or calendar of “35 nude male races held on Kersal Moor [near Manchester] between 1777 and 1811”.

The “oldest mathematical textbook still in common use today”, according to Printing and the Mind of man, is that written around 300BC by the Greek mathematician, Euclid of Alexandria.

As in many previous years, the months of June and July signal the arrival of large numbers of important book, manuscript and related sales.

Samuel Miller Freeman II – known to all as Beau – was a fixture in the Philadelphia auction scene for just shy of six decades.

An exceptionally rare miniature book, a 'Kalendarium Evangelia' printed by Christopher Plantin in Antwerp in 1570, measuring just 35mm high appeared at a recent Bonhams sale.

For a number of years now ship’s logs have made good prices at auction. Those featuring naval engagements, significant encounters in foreign lands, or with added, if amateur illustration – even logs kept on whalers that use simple sketches to record a catch – offer something extra.

Karl Bodmer, a Swiss artist, was engaged by Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied to provide a pictorial record of his 1833-34 travels among the Indians of the Upper Missouri regions of North America.

Some of the more successful lots in a June 1 sale at PBA Galleries (20/15% buyer’s premium) of the first portion of the Richard Beagle collection of angling and sporting books were scarce accounts of early hunting trips in the Yukon and Wyoming.

ATG's selection of upcoming sale highlights.

On July 13 Boston saleroom Skinner will be offering the Victor & Muriel Polikoff Collection comprising nearly 300 lots of 18th and early 19th century ceramics.

The New York-based art shipping firm Arta is in the process of raising its second round of funding – this time to help it expand in the UK and Europe.

The city of Council Bluffs is the seat of Pottawattamie County in IOWA and takes its name from the Potawatomi Native American tribe.

Leslie Hindman’s curriculum vitae encapsulates the changing American auction scene across four decades.