News

UK: STEPHEN Morris Shipping were back in business first thing on Monday morning last week after fire destroyed their new Kings Cross premises on the previous Friday afternoon.

UK: SIR Alfred James Munnings proved as great a magnet as ever at Sotheby’s South’s Billingshurst rooms on July 18 when a watercolour sketch for one of his oil paintings fetched a hammer price of £62,000, more than double the low estimate.

The Art of the Book: From Medieval Manuscript to Graphic Novel edited by James Bettley, published by V&A Publications. ISBN 1851773339. £30 hb.

Hiroshige Fan Prints by Rupert Faulkner, published by V&A Publications. ISBN 01851773320. £30 hb.

Miller’s Collecting Science & Technology, by Lindsay Stirling, consultant George Glastris. ISBN 1840000791. £19.99 hb.

The long debate over droit de suite, the artists resale levy, is over after the European Union finally ratified the measure in Brussels last week.

A previously unknown and early draft of one of the key closing chapters of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the Eumaeus episode, was offered at Sotheby’s on July 10, and it was one of two committed private buyers who took the lot to £780,000, just short of the low estimate.