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A named designer and good provenance sent this oak refectory table and benches, right, to the highest price at Woolley & Wallis’ sale on March 2.

WITH their new magazine-format catalogues and weekend viewings and sales, Christie’s (20/12% buyer’s premium) are currently making a conscious effort to present themselves to the buying public as a customer-friendly art and antiques retailer.

by Richard FalkinerThe calendar year gets off to an early start with sales in New York in January and then nothing much happens until spring is heralded by March. Nature abhors a vacuum and there is always somebody who fills the slot.

THE new-style collectors’ sales held by Greenslade Taylor Hunt (15% buyer’s premium) at Taunton are proving a winning format, with wide-ranging, briefly catalogued but illustrated lots with low reserves.

Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), the First World War leader known as The Tiger, and also famous as the editor of L’Aurore, who published Zola’s J’Accuse at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, was the subject of an unusual sale at Osenat (15% buyer’s premium) in Fontainebleau on February 13.

by Alex CaponMARKET-FRESH pictures in good condition by major names...meet all three of these criteria and success is virtually assured. And, as was evident at the March 1 sale held in Exeter by Bearne’s (15/10% buyer’s premium), two out of three ain’t bad.

Two one-day events putting the spotlight on art crime will be held in the capital in May.

ONE dealer who concurs with the findings in a recent BADA poll that shop exhibitions play an increasingly important part in business is Wiltshire ceramics specialist (and BADA member) Andrew Dando.

When Bonhams embarked on their first dispersal of the mammoth Zorensky collection of First Period Worcester, there were murmurings in the trade (and presumably some crossed fingers in the saleroom’s ceramics department).

This year’s jewellery sales in the upscale Swiss winter resort of St Moritz – an annual fixture since 1995 – again fomented plenty of interest among the well-heeled private clientele in town at the height of the skiing season.

Remarkable things continue to happen in the Beswick market. Consider the fortunes of a handful of scarce, but damaged, models seen recently at the Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent rooms of Louis Taylor (12.5% buyer’s premium).

Annie Kevorkian was also the expert at a sale staged by Cannes Auction (19% buyer’s premium) at the Hôtel Martinez on La Croisette on February 20, dominated by a locally-consigned, single-owner collection of Ottoman ceramics.

A local estate was the source of some fine Meiji ivories sold by Cheshire auctioneers Frank Marshall (15% buyer’s premium) of Knutsford on January 11.

Good corkscrews continue to attract solid sums. Alongside the likes of Thomas Lund and Edwin Cotterill, Robert Jones is one of the big names of the English patent market, if only because his so-called ‘Robert Jones II’ is among the rarest and most valuable of all corkscrews.

Alongside more traditional antiques and fine art, the March 10 sale at Morphets of Harrogate includes the biannual specialist sale of Arts & Crafts and 20th Century Design and Decorative Arts.

The recent competition seen for rare First World War silks was repeated at the sale conducted by Specialised Postcard Auctions (10% buyer’s premium) of Cirencester on December 6.

On a day when some unusual offerings caught the eye at the Nottingham sale held by Mellors & Kirk, one such lot was a set of 36 Anglo-Indian Company School Delhi or Agra oval miniatures dating to 1827 and depicting India’s nobility and their wives, six of whom are shown right.

THE ATG online price guide has notched up more than 500,000 individual prices for items sold at auction.

by Ian McKayLAST summer, when a large Biggles collection was put up for sale in Swindon, results were a little disappointing – at least for some of those titles offered individually, where some reserves proved too strong for collectors and trade alike – and around half of the 100 lots were bought in – but W.E. Johns’ famous creation certainly does not lack admirers and in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of February, a much smaller group of Biggles books, mostly from one source, brought good prices.

If a silhouette was going to set a new auction record then this elaborately embellished, highly decorative and grandiose royal subject was surely a good candidate. When it sold for £9500 (plus 20 per cent premium) at Bonhams on February 22, it beat the auctioneers’ own previous auction high of £8000 set last year by a Torond conversation piece.