News

THE controversy over whether fox hunting should be banned may rumble on, but, presumably, even the most committed hunt saboteur could not take exception to this intriguing Victorian fantasy painting.

IT is sad to report that the Classics Bookshop in Turl Street, Oxford is soon to close due, I understand, to increases in rent required by Lincoln College. I am told that many shops in the Turl are affected.

A LOT from the Michael Wittock collection of important Renaissance bindings sold by Christie’s on July 7, this is one of the two vols. that make up an exceptional copy of the 1540, first Aldine edition of the works of Machiavelli and was one of a large number of books bound in Venice in 1547 for Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, the humanist Bishop of Arras, by a craftsman who came to be known as the Fugger Binder after one of his later patrons.

RIGHT: Indoor Athlete, a signed “first stone” lithograph of 1921 by American artist George Bellows, which made $13,000 (£7065) in a May 21-23 sale held by Northeast Auctions of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

MEANWHILE, that well-known and popular organiser Reg Cooper, who knows as much about the vicissitudes of the business as most, is returning confidently to the fray with a new venture.

WITH a turnover last year in excess of £5 million, Vectis, who are based in Stockton-on-Tees, are well known as the world’s largest auctioneers of toys. Perhaps less well known is the fact that the company also organise shows and, for some years, have put together the successful London Toy Soldier Show at The Royal National Hotel in London’s Bloomsbury.

ONCE owned by a member of Henri III’s ‘Compagnie des Confrères de la Mort’, this psalmbook, right, a 1586 Parisian edition of Le pseaultier de David..., is bound in French sombre morocco.