East of England

FEW fair organisers are bolder than Caroline Penman who, for decades, has been putting together such respected and traditional fixtures as the Chelsea and West London Antique Fairs. Not every Penman endeavour succeeds, but Caroline keeps coming up with new ideas and venues and, from September 3 to 5, she moves to East Anglia to launch the Bury St. Edmunds Antiques Fair at The Athenaeum in the Suffolk town’s Angel Square.

WITH giant sales every three weeks, Keys (10% buyer's premium) of Aylsham will cheerfully put two-figure lots under the hammer, but there were also a number of four-figure sellers to help swell the hammer total to £110,000 at the latest 1640-lot outing on June 2-3.

THE very earliest English porcelain has long held sway in the market, but one feature of Part I of the mammoth Zorensky Worcester collection sold by Bonhams in March was the high prices paid for some of the late 1760s and early 1770s underglaze blue ground tablewares.

THIS walking stick, thought to have once belonged to John Adams, the longest surviving of the Bounty mutineers, will be on offer at Sworders' (15% buyer’s premium) Summer Country House sale on July 20-21. It is made from a vine found on Pitcairn Island, where Adams and eight of the other mutineers famously settled after landing there on January 23, 1790.

HIGHLIGHT of the Collectors’ Sale conducted by Keys (10% buyer’s premium) in Aylsham was this silver-mounted ivory flute by Monzani.

THAT most singular of publications, Salvo, holds its annual fair on July 3 and 4 at Knebworth House, Hertfordshire.

FOUND in a box of aviation books that was brought into the salerooms of Sworders of Stansted Mountfitchet following a North London house clearance was a little pamphlet entitled Experiments and Observations in Soaring Flight.

OVER the last couple of years, a number of auctioneers have been complaining that lesser-name Victorian watercolours in the sub-£500 range have become the weakest of all areas at picture sales, sometimes to the point of having no market at all.

THE estimates were rather modest, but prices paid for some of the Biggles books offered as part of a May 21 sale held by Keys of Aylsham bode well for the Biggles collection that Dominic Winter are to sell on June 24. In Aylsham, Hamilton copies of The Black Peril of c.1936, in soiled blue cloth, and The Cruise of the Condor, an undated Ace series title with adverts for Spring 1937, were valued at around £40 apiece but sold for £1050 and £480 respectively.

EAST Anglian early furniture specialist Andrew Singleton has, for many years, held a popular pre-Christmas selling exhibition at his shop, Suffolk House Antiques, in Yoxford High Street, and following the consistent success of these shows he is staging a summer version, opening on June 12 and running for a week.

CAMBRIDGESHIRE dealers Simon and Penny Rumble generally deal with the trade and by appointment only from Causeway End Farmhouse, Chittering, but they have just converted a barn into a new showroom and celebrate from June 17 to 20 with a selling exhibition to which everyone is welcome.

WHILE hundreds of dealers will be heading to London in June, this weekend, from May 29 to 31, others are heading out of town to the Langley Park Spring Antiques Fair, organised at Langley Park School, Loddon, by Norfolk based Liz Allport-Lomax of Lomax Antiques Fairs.

RUNNING until next Monday May 31 is the first Art Deco Fair to be held by Woburn Abbey Antiques Centre at Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire.

ANOTHER piece of wine-related silver was among the better sellers at Olivers (10% buyer's premium) April 1 sale in the form of an Edwardian monteith.

AT Gorringes’ (15% buyer's premium) April 27-29 sale, specialist Aaron Dean was satisfied with the reaction to some 200 lots of silver but, with the market for routine tea services and so on remaining fairly moribund, it is the smaller collectables which catch the eye.

MOST of us are familiar with the designs Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and Keith Murray produced for Wedgwood, but how many have heard of Norman Makinson?

KEYS (10% buyer's premium) of Aylsham maintain the format of mammoth offerings – 1556 lots offered over two days (April 20-21) in this case – and, although only 60 per cent of them got away, there was plenty of material for budget-conscious collectors of such favourites as Royal Doulton character jugs and figures as well as Beswick Beatrix Potter and animal models.

BILLED as a regular Victorian sale, the main attractions of Abbots Auction Rooms' (10% buyer's premium) March 29 sale were in a 129-lot specialist decorative arts section – in particular two pieces of René Lalique glass.

VOLUME sales have their value but the conscious decision of Cambridge auctioneers Cheffins (15% buyer's premium) to go for quality rather than quantity – relegating lower-end consignments to fortnightly general outings and keeping the best for five well-promoted annual sales – has proved a winning format.

TWO albums of 19th century Chinese photographs assembled by a British diplomat sold for £5200 in a general antiques sale held by Sworders at Stansted Mountfitchet, on March 30.