Forum Auctions

Bid just short of the high estimate to sell at £56,000 in a Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) sale was a rare complete set in 25 original parts of John Gould’s 'Monograph of the Trochilidae, or Family of Humming Birds' of 1849-61.

Among the selection of instructional games and pastimes featured at Forum Auctions (25/12/12% buyer’s premium) on November 21 two of the more successful lots were published by Edward Wallis.

Watercolour collection sold at auction represents a ‘who’s who’ of the city in the 1830s

Personal devotional prayer books, known as a Book of Hours, were popular among the wealthy and powerful in late medieval Europe. Illuminated with miniature paintings depicting the life of Christ, the Virgin Mary and saints, they were sometimes personalised for the patrons who commissioned them.

Bid to a record £20,000 at a Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on September 26 was a beautifully bound example of Piranesi’s Campus Martius Antiquae Urbis.

Code locked in a briefcase for two decades, a finely preserved, 1997 first issue of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was finally released this summer after being delivered by its Lancashire owners into the hands of a Derbyshire saleroom.

Estimated at £10,000-15,000 in a Forum Auctions sale of November 21 is a French indenture agreement of 1421 with a certain added English appeal.

A small but very successful section of a recent London sale offered a group of just eight lots related to the British Arctic Expedition of 1875-76.

Much of Paula Rego’s (b.1935) work is concerned with narrative, as seen in this limited-edition lithograph of a girl reading a book.

A final selection of works from the London summer sale of books from the Fox Pointe Manor library* includes a gruesome account of London’s ‘Great Plague’.

Very different works by Daniel Defoe featured in an online summer sale in London: one famous, the other far removed in its subject matter and probably little known.

Useful buys if you want to know how to ‘pott a Swan’, ‘fry Harticholk’ or even ‘stew Lettice’

Lots offered towards the start of sales at the same auction house prove successful.

Copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone impressed in several summer sales.

For three years now Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) has, in addition to its high-profile auctions, been holding fortnightly, online-only timed sales that in their diverse content, it feels, act as a useful bellwether for the book world at large.