Collectables

One of just 100 copies of a scarce, privately published edition of poems called Salvo for Russia, produced in 1942 in aid of the ‘Comforts Fund for Women and Children of Russia’, was offered in a recent West Country sale.

Early recipe books can make for absorbing and, to modern readers, occasionally comic or puzzling reading, as demonstrated in three examples from recent sales.

Used to dramatic effect on the cover of the catalogue for a Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) sale, shown below is one of a collection of around 125 monochrome watercolour drawings of Irish lighthouses and the Irish coastline produced c.1860-67.

The central 350-lot section of the auction of clocks, watches and scientific instruments to be held by Skinner in Marlborough on April 20 comprises a single-owner collection of European tools.

Early maps and charts, previously owned by a Brazilian banker convicted of money laundering, surfaced for sale at Chiswick Auctions last week.

One says Scottish rather than Scotch except when one is referring to the spirit – or indeed, motor spirit as evident at the Edinburgh rooms of Thomson Roddick Scottish Auctions (17.5% buyer’s premium).

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from April 4-27, 2018.

With species extermination very much in the news following the death of the world’s last male northern white rhino, there was added poignancy to a cased and stuff bird offered at Summers Place Auctions (25% buyer’s premium).

At some point in its life, an early photographically illustrated work on the art of wood turning offered in a recent Exeter sale had been converted for use as a postcard album, but it still sold for a four-times estimate £4300.

Successful lots in a Bonhams New York (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) March 9 auction included, at $85,000 (£61,595), a letter that Einstein wrote to his son, Hans Albert, on the very day in September 1945 that the Second World War officially ended.

When the first wave of Kenner Star Wars action figures began arriving on the market in 1978, the Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker figures came with ‘double telescoping’ light sabres.

In answer to the question “why do you want to climb Mount Everest?” mountaineer George Mallory, who died on it in 1924, famously replied “because it’s there”.

Only a few examples of the rare four-part British quad poster for the 1965 James Bond movie 'Thunderball' exist in uncut form.

MADAM – I sympathise with your correspondent Phil Higginbotham (Letters, ATG No 2335), who decries booksellers’ notes on endpapers.

The English-born political theorist Thomas Paine lived through the most turbulent of times.

In a career of remarkable highs and lows, incorporating high political office, financial scandal and near bankruptcy, enormous success as a novelist and imprisonment for perjury during a libel case that he had won years earlier, Jeffrey Archer has himself been the subject of many a caricature and cartoon.