South-west England

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Plastic has gained a bad name when it comes to the environment – clogging up oceans for a start.

Simon Shore is a north Cotswolds dealer and agent who runs 1793 gallery in Stow on the Wold.

It may seem hard to credit nowadays, but photographs of fairies at the bottom of the Cottingley (Yorkshire) garden of two young girls, produced in 1917 as a practical joke, were taken to be genuine by many people – most famously, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Catching the eye in a German auction was a fine example of the most beautiful of all piscatorial plate books.

Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury will sell an important oil by Chinese contemporary artist Yang Fei Yun (b.1954) next month. It comes for sale from the charity established by Body Shop founder Dame Anita Roddick (1942-2007).

The biannual world tour of tribal lands – Alaska to New Zealand via Arizona, Africa and Taiwan – organised by auctioneer Will Hobbs at Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) offered a global view of what is an active, if often unpredictable, field.

The remote rocky islands of Orkney were a source of continued inspiration for the prolific Scottish painter Stanley Cursiter (1887-1976).

A collection of fashion books and plates offered as part of an Exeter sale on September 12 was led at £1050 by an 1831, second edition of John Jackson’s The Improved Tailor’s Aera.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

What still feels to many like the opening month of a new season got off to an excellent start with some serious, if occasionally unexpected, five-figure bids at four major provincial salerooms.

In the past, pictures by talented but obscure female artists were given short shrift on the secondary market. Now all that is changing.

Organised by the well-known Somerset textiles dealers Liz and Jack van Hasselt, the regular West Country Textiles Weekend takes place next on Saturday and Sunday, October 6-7.

British modernist Kenneth Lauder (1916-2004) used to entreat his opticians to create spectacles that would allow him to see the world upside down. They refused, but he remained determined to view life in a different way.

Dealer Mel Caswell, based in Bristol, specialises in Japanese art and unusual objects.

In a worn but period calf binding, a 1697 first of John Evelyn’s Numismata. A Discourse of Medals… made £350 in the book section of a recent Cornish auction.