News

Antique Boxes, Tea Caddies & Society 1700-1880 by Antigone Clarke & Joseph 0’Kelly, published by Schiffer Publishing Ltd, distributed by Bushwood Books, 6 Marksbury Avenue, Kew Gardens, Surrey TW9 4JF. ISBN 0764316885 £69.95hb

Echoing Voices: More Memories of a Country House Snooper by John Harris, published by John Murray. ISBN 0179564921 £8.99sb

The news earlier this year that Lissadell House and its 400-acre estate in Co. Sligo was on the market for the first time since its completion in the 1830s led to immediate calls to save the country seat of the Gore-Booth family for the Irish people.

NAVA, the National Association of Valuers and Auctioneers, welcomed 70 members to their weekend conference and annual general meeting in Edinburgh, that started on November 20. Highlights included a paper presented by auctioneer Martin Spencer-Thomas entitled: A Revolutionary Concept with Potential or Complete Lunacy?

JUST in time for Halloween, a warm-blooded and unidentified mortal paid $10,000 (£5920) for this box of tools designed for vampire killing, pictured right. Sold as part of Sotheby’s New York 19th Century Furniture and Decorative Arts sale on October 30, a label on the kit says: “This box contains the items considered necessary for persons who travel into certain little known countries of Eastern Europe where the populace are plagued with a particular manifestation of evil known as Vampires.”

IT was one of those landmark events that generated a perceptible buzz of expectation and drew the English porcelain collecting fraternity out of the woodwork en masse. Bonhams’ November 26 auction of the collection of the late Billie Pain pulled a capacity crowd to their Bond Street rooms and saw the trade and private collectors contest the 341 lots of prime early English porcelain to almost £782,000, getting on for twice the pre-sale predictions.

REGARDED by the professionals as the place to spot trends, New York’s double weekend Triple Pier Antiques Show, on November 8 and 9 and then November 15 and 16, pulled in its best crowds since the 1990s and private buying proved very strong.