Auctions

Rugby is said to be akin to a religion in Wales and Cardiff saleroom Rogers Jones (18% buyer’s premium inc VAT) has scored impressively in recent years with related lots – such as the auction record for a shirt.

This late 9ct gold Football League medal was awarded to Billy Bassett (1869-1937), one of the best-known footballers of the late Victorian era.

From a 5000-year-old pictographic tablet to a 5th century bible leaf - a small but fascinating London auction.

Even though the Bauhaus design school was forcibly closed in 1933, its influence continues to this day.

Estimated at £400-600, a Chinese porcelain vase was bid to £1.3m at an auction in Hampshire last week.

This Italian marble bust of an emperor, catalogued as 17th century after the antique, provided a moment of saleroom drama at Sworders’ Fine Interiors auction in Stansted on September 10.

A gold, jade and rock crystal model of a sedan chair by Fabergé was hammered down at £380,000 last week – a new house record for a Gloucestershire auctioneer.

George du Maurier (1834-96) joined the staff at Punch magazine in 1865, drawing two ink cartoons a week until his eyesight deteriorated in 1891. His most common targets were the affected manners of Victorian society and Britain’s growing middle class in particular.

Sotheby’s opened its September Asia Week auctions in New York on September 10 with the $8.3m sale of Chinese art consigned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Boosted by the ‘wrong therefore rare’ factor – so important in the world of collectables – a 1977 British quad film poster for the first Star Wars film took top billing in a 250-lot specialist sale at Ewbank’s (24% buyer’s premium).

The second published work of the ‘flower book lady’ has no other auction appearance

Hindman Auctions will be selling a Midwestern collector’s ensemble of rare books in an 85 lot auction in Chicago on November 5.

Estimated at just £40-60, this ebonised wood and alabaster table casket sold to a bidder using thesaleroom.com for £1600 at Peter Francis (20% buyer’s premium) of Carmarthen on August 28.

A final selection of works from the London summer sale of books from the Fox Pointe Manor library* includes a gruesome account of London’s ‘Great Plague’.

A model example of trans-European trucking, this diecast van advertising a Swiss company was made in Italy and sold to a German buyer at the Runcorn rooms of British Toy Auctions (18% buyer’s premium).

Pitched at £500-800, this grand sonnerie carriage clock came with little information for bidders at Jacobs & Hunt’s (22% buyer’s premium) sale in Liss other than plentiful illustrations and the name C Marcks & Co, Bombay and Poona engraved to the silvered dial.