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Les Ecosses have always had a certain cachet in France and it was the Parisian jewellers Chaumet who, in the 1950s, made this brooch, right, in the form of bagpipes, the naturally dimpled baroque pearl used imaginatively as the bag, the pipes adorned by single cut diamonds and turquoise stones. At Sotheby’s Gleneagles sale it sold to a Scottish private bidder at £4000.

DEALERS across the country need to beware of a new campaign to con the trade into paying unnecessary fees for registering under the Data Protection Act.

A second hand bookshop in Glasgow and two dealers are locked in a legal dispute over the ownership of a lost cache of William Blake watercolours, valued at over £1m.

ST James’s art dealer Peter Nahum is behind a website just launched specifically with the art and antiques trade in mind. Called Penseroso, it has taken Mr Nahum and his team three years to develop and although there are already website systems aimed at the trade he feels none has fully understood the specialist needs of a dealer.

A presentation set of The Writings of Mark Twain offered as part of the Sotheby’s New York sale of June 18, a 1903 ‘Hillcrest’ edition, lacked one of the 23 volumes and some of the spines and labels were darkened.

From the lakes of Killarney to the golf links of St Andrews via the Norfolk Broads, there is hardly any corner of Ireland and the British Isles that is not covered by Christie’s South Kensington’s sale of Travel Posters, which takes place next week on September 12.

USA: The 200-lot literature section of a photograph sale held by Swanns on June 6 included a good run of the famous American publication, Camera Work, comprising Nos. 1 and 3-10 of the years 1903-05, plus the Steichen supplement of 1906.

THE highlight of the wide-ranging 1400-lot collectors’ sale held by Greenslade Taylor Hunt (15% buyer’s premium) at Taunton on July 20, was a Morris Minor 1000, from the Matchbox series, crucially painted in pale brown.

Setting new standards of perfection in a condition-conscious toy marketplace at Skinner’s of Boston Massachusetts on July 20 was an unopened 1962 Mattel shipping carton containing 12 New Fashion Queen Barbies.

NEARLY 40 years after 15 men stole 120 mail bags containing £2.6m from the Royal Mail train as it passed through the Buckinghamshire countryside, the Great Train Robbery can still arouse controversy. In 1969 the police held an auction of items found in the robbers’ hideout on behalf of the banks who lost money.

This large Highland hunting landscape by John Frederick Herring Senior proved to be the highlight of Sotheby’s annual auction series held last week at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, when it sold for £470,000 (plus 19.5/10% premium) to London dealer Richard Green Fine Art bidding on the phone.

GERMANY: The sales of the firm of Kricheldorf (15% buyer’s premium) of Freiburg are relatively rare occasions but when they do hold them there are a large number of lots. There were two sales in July at Berlin. That on July 29-30 was a general affair (4205 lots).

Many sporrans are military or feral in character, but this leather wallet had graced the groin of Sir Harry Lauder, legendary laird of the music hall. Winston Churchill sounded dangerously like Samuel Johnson when he described the folk singer and comedian as “Scotland’s greatest ever ambassador”, but there is no doubt that Lauder, though dead since 1950, remains popular with tourists who swallow his sentimental vision of the old country.

THE Essex auctioneers Ambrose had hoped the unusual top lot in their 561-lot sale on 19-20 July would fetch more, but bidding on the set of ten gothic-style Victorian mahogany dining chairs was hampered by their non-commercial design.

UK: FROM October 1 – 31, to mark the 602nd anniversary of Chaucer’s death, the Gallery in the Friars, Canterbury, is holding an exhibition, entitled The Canterbury Tales.

THE State of Illinois is on the verge of introducing a new law to tackle Internet fraud that could lead the way for legislation elsewhere in the US and across the world.

ANTIQUES fairs currently allowed to operate without planning permission may continue to do so after the Government announced that there would be no change in the law after all.

Inherently rare – in occupied France you wouldn’t want to be caught with a copy – this flimsy sheet of propaganda issued by the maquis at the height of WWII comes up for sale at Dominic Winter Book Auctions in Swindon on August 28.

ON July 23 Bristol Auction Rooms (15% buyer’s premium) took the second highest price at auction for an oil by Hampshire artist Henry Garland (1854-1900). Back in December 1998 Bonhams Knightsbridge took a premium- inclusive £12,650 for the 3ft 4in by 5ft 7in (1.02 x 1.70m) oil Village Gossips.

AMSTERDAM: It was a full house at the Christie’s Amsterdam(23.205% buyer’s premium) salerooms on July 2, when the one-off sale of African and Oceanic Art from the Estate of the late Baron Freddy Rolin took place.