News

While Dee, Atkinson & Harrison's (10% buyer's premium) August 20 sale did not comprise the best quality works from Ganton Hall, Scarborough, there was no shortage of competition for the there-to-sell and fresh-to-market residual contents from its attics and cellars ensuring that the 483-lot outing eclipsed its £30,000 estimated hammer total at £48,000.

COMPETING against the likes of Carlton Ware and Crown Ducal for market share, cheerful mass-produced ceramics were what the prolific Fieldings Crown Devon factory did best. The best of the second best, if you like.

JOHN Haslam’s Illustrations of Madness of 1810, the first book-length account of a single psychiatric case and a classic of the early literature in this field, was inspired by the case of James Tilly Matthews, a London tea merchant who undertook a self-styled peace mission between France and England in 1793.

THE ebullient Samuel Boscher (16.74% buyer’s premium) was in typically sonorous form for his annual two-day summer jamboree in Cherbourg on August 8/9.

JULY may now seem like ancient history but it is worth putting on record the wholly unexpected performance of a late Regency period circular dining table offered by Mallams (15% buyer’s premium) from their Cheltenham rooms on July 22.

NOW that’s what I call a conservatory – Item No. 237 from a two vol. Illustrated Catalogue of Macfarlane’s Castings of c.1884, this monster is one of the very many items of decorative cast iron railings, gates, balconies, windows, lamps, glasshouses, etc. available from the manufacturers.

ESTIMATED at £70-100 but bid way past that level by Taikoo Books of York was a copy of Captain R.L. Playfair’s History of Arabia Felix or Yemen…, a Bombay imprint of 1859 which also includes an account of the British settlement at Aden.