News

THE sad plight of silver is as well known as the boom in all Arts and Crafts pieces – what happens when the two come together was the question at Sworders’ sale when this pair of plated candlesticks, right, were offered.

THE Office of Fair Trading are investigating the activities of a London-based listings firm whose mailshots to the trade have sparked complaints.

TED Adams, who has died aged 72, helped Antiques Trade Gazette Coins and Medals correspondent Richard Falkiner set up what is thought to have been the first independent courier service in the UK.

CHRISTIE’S have unveiled some major changes for their 20th century decorative arts policy in Europe. The auction house have closed their King Street department and are concentrating all their London activities in decorative arts at South Kensington. They also want to develop and raise the profile of this field in France with regular dedicated auctions in Paris under specialist Sonja Ganne.

LAUNCHED 18 years ago with the interior decorator in mind, a reminder that the thrice-yearly Decorative Antiques and Textiles Fair is still going strong and will be held this week in its trademark marquee in Battersea Park, London SW11 from January 14 to 19.

CURRENTLY decorators’ darlings, the distinctive and different antique dealers David Grocott and Ian Lemon, who work out of Chelsea’s Core One under the name Plinth, are taking a stand at the Spring Fine Art and Antiques Fair at London’s Olympia from February 25 to March 2.

Fully coloured as intended, and presumably under the direction of the author/publisher, the uroscopic woodcut reproduced right is found in an internally fine copy of Ulrich Pinder’s Epiphanie medicorum… printed in Nuremburg in 1506 and is intended to show different shades of urine.