International

It is high season for sales in Paris and the Drouot auction centre, home to 75 firms, is busy with its usual roster across all disciplines.

For previous generations of artist jewellers, from René Lalique to Andrew Grima, retail sales and private commissions were everything. Typically it was only much later in the collecting lifecycle, after a period of posthumous reassessment and rediscovery, that their work appeared at auction with any great regularity.

Original D-Day invasion flags may be fragile and rare but a spate of them has appeared on the market recently in the US.

The Brussels Vintage Market was launched in 2010 at the delightfully named café Madame Moustache with about a dozen vintage vendors.

A well-provenanced collection of Beatles and other rock memorabilia will be a highlight in one of Butterscotch Auctioneers’ tri-annual estate auctions at its Bedford, New York, saleroom on July 16.

This rather unsettling woodcut illustration shown above, an almost surreal depiction of an amputation, is taken from from a 1515, Grüninger of Strasbourg edition of Hieronymous Brunschwig’s Das buch der wund Artzeny. Handwirkung der Cirurgia.

The collection of Tiffany jewels offered by Christie’s New York (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on June 20 was the finest at auction in recent memory.

Ahead of the autumn sale of a star lot, Phillips' watch expert Aurel Bacs tells ATG why the time is right for the firm to expand its US watch business

Art books in a Ketterer Kunst (20% buyer’s premium) sale of May 22 included one of 15 deluxe copies of a 1950 edition of Harry Roskolenko’s Paris Poems, containing an original watercolour by Zau Wou-Ki and an extra suite of his lithographed illustrations. It sold at €42,000 (£36,240).

One of the odder lots I have stumbled across in the many June book sales is a worn and soiled 12pp autograph catalogue, or calendar of “35 nude male races held on Kersal Moor [near Manchester] between 1777 and 1811”.

The “oldest mathematical textbook still in common use today”, according to Printing and the Mind of man, is that written around 300BC by the Greek mathematician, Euclid of Alexandria.

The global trade body for antiquities dealers has insisted that Europe does not provide a ready market for looted artefacts from conflict zones.

As in many previous years, the months of June and July signal the arrival of large numbers of important book, manuscript and related sales.

Samuel Miller Freeman II – known to all as Beau – was a fixture in the Philadelphia auction scene for just shy of six decades.

The panther is a big cat much favoured by sculptors – not only the animaliers but also those who searched for a stylishly sleek motif during the early 20th century, where it can be seen depicted on screens and vases as well as in the round.

An exceptionally rare miniature book, a 'Kalendarium Evangelia' printed by Christopher Plantin in Antwerp in 1570, measuring just 35mm high appeared at a recent Bonhams sale.