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MASTERING search engines is the key to gaining better exposure on the Internet, according to one firm who have started offering an alternative to signing up to major portal sites.

HOPES of finalising a draft of proposals for developing the new Home Office database for beating art crime by the beginning of October have not been realised. It now appears that it will be at least another two months before the proposals can be submitted to the parliamentary committee looking into them for assessment.

Jean-Vital Remy was one of the most determined and assiduous Dinky toy collectors. Over a relatively short space of time – around 15 years from the mid-1980s – this Belgian enthusiast built up an enormous assemblage of French and English Dinkys spanning the entire production period. His desire for comprehensiveness and determination to acquire pieces with unusual colour or design variations made him a formidable adversary when it came to buying, whether at auctions or in shops or fairs.

THIS week sees the announcement of two new auction houses for the West Midlands, the first based in Stourbridge, near Birmingham, the second in Newport, Shropshire.

Any dealer, collector or curator would love to get hold of the ultimate reference catalogue of Victorian artistic design, especially if it was bound in gilt stamped red morocco and velvet housed in a purpose-built satinwood cabinet complete with four volumes of jury reports and a case of five medals.

At the end of the morning session of Sotheby’s Garden Statuary sale at Billingshurst, the National Trust took over the rostrum to offer such items for gardening enthusiasts as an avenue of 40 young limes from the Trust’s nursery in Cheshire, home visits from Trust gardening experts and so on, but the piece of trade interest was a scrapbook kept by Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst donated by her son Nigel Nicolson.

MALCOLM HORD has announced that he is to retire as chief executive of LAPADA, the Association of Art and Antique Dealers, at the end of May next year.