London

UK: A POTENT combination of nostalgia and rarity lay behind the £12,000 paid for the poster pictured here in Christie’s South Kensington’s (17.5/10 per cent buyer’s premium) annual ski poster sale on February 22.

UK: IN A richly gilt and inlaid green morocco binding by Bayntun Rivière, a copy of the 1894 Kelmscott edition of Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon – an ex-Beeleigh Abbey lot with William Foyle’s red morocco bookplate – was sold at £1700 (Shapero).

UK: THE title page of a 1613, first complete edition of Galileo Galilei’s Istoria e Dimostrazioni..., containing his observations on the sunspots and his discoveries relating to the rotation of the sun – the first to contain Scheiner’s letters to Welser – which, bound in contemporary vellum, made £4500 (Quaritch) as an ex-Fort Augustus lot.

UK: Sotheby’s are hoping one of the most important watercolours by J.M.W. Turner to come to the rostrum will smash all previous auction records for the artist when it comes under the hammer in London on June 14.

Filippo Bonanni’s Gabinetto Armonico of 1723 will be familiar to most lovers of old musical instruments in the form of a Dover reprint of the 1960s, but the engraved plate reproduced above is one of 152 from the Fort Augustus copy of the real thing, bound in contemporary mottled calf gilt, which sold at £3800 to Bruce Marshall.

Art Deco UK: DANCER of Kapurthala, this 22in (56cm) high Chiparus bronze and ivory cat-suited agile performer atop a marble base, provided the highlight of Christie’s South Kensington’s (17.5/10 per cent buyer’s premium) fourth Classic Art Deco sale on February 15 when it sold for £32,000 to a British collector.

Ceramics – The Jack Hacking Collection UK: THE JACK Hacking collection of English ceramics, offered by Phillips’ Bayswater (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) rooms back on January 23, was a less academic, more eclectic property than Norman Stretton’s. But it was not by any means a general collection since it had quite specific areas of interest.

London: Back in the 1860s, long before the days of Action Man and GI Joe, what did a young lad do if he wanted a manly miniature role model, a real boy’s toy?

UK: Morris sets out his vision for a market. UK: A NO dateline policy for all three Olympia antique fairs is among the plans Andrew Morris, chief executive of Earls Court and Olympia and head of Clarion Events, the halls’ organising arm, has revealed in an exclusive interview with the Antiques Trade Gazette.

Bond Movie Memorabilia UK: IT WAS hardly surprising that Ursula Andress’s bikini, as worn in the memorable scene when she emerges from the sea in Dr No, should capture so much of the pre- and post-sale publicity for Christie’s South Kensington’s (17.5/10 per cent buyer’s premium) second auction devoted entirely to James Bond memorabilia.

UK: LONDON was far from bereft of carpet auctions in January and February with all the major salerooms holding auctions.

UK: ONE of 50 coloured illustrations from Alexandre Iacovleff’s Dessins et Peintures d’Afrique of 1927, which sold for £800. One of 100 copies, it comprised a text volume in leather-backed satin covers painted with an African design and a pigskin portfolio containing the loose plates.

UK: THE FIRST Phillips sale of the year gets a largely pictorial treatment here, but not everything that I selected for report was illustrated in the catalogue and a number of other highlights are described elsewhere (see "Job lots with a difference", above).

UK: A COUPLE of weeks ago the Antiques Trade Gazette recorded the sale of the Joe Marshall Collection which put an extra sheen on the January sales at Sotheby’s South (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium). Among the goldmine of antiques veteran dealer Mr Marshall had shown Billingshurst chairman Tim Wonnacott in 1996, in a secret vault at his Blackburn shop, were a couple of oils by Charles Spencelayh R.M.S. (1865-1958) one of which was Mother shown here, which led the sale.

UK: ONE of the scarcer plate collections in the Phillips sale was Via Crucis, novellamente eretta nell’ Atrio del Santissimo Crocifisso della chiesa parochiale, e collegiata di S.Polo. Engraved throughout, this small quarto Venetian volume of c.1780 comprises 16 full-page illustrations of the Stations of the Cross by Leonardis after Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, plus 29 pages of text.

LONDON: DESPITE there being no official announcement from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the papers have been full of the news that Mark Jones is to be the new director of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

UK: THE English Literature and History sale held by Sotheby’s on December 19 opened in unexpectedly dramatic fashion when an English alchemical manuscript drawn up in 1624 by Leonard Smethley, miraculously transmuted an estimate of £6000-8000 into something just as welcome as the gold or silver that ancient practitioners hoped for – a huge bid of £180,000!

UK: When a private UK vendor consigned a Chinese celadon jade cup to Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) at £400-600, he could not have hoped in his wildest dreams to sell it for almost 50 times the low estimate.

UK: Last week London saw Sotheby’s and Christie’s first ever round of major Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales in February.

UK: IT WAS standard case furniture: tables and other useful pieces of mahogany that made much of the running in the 224-lot sale of furniture held by Christie's South Kensington on January 10, topped at £12,000 by a good Georgian library bookcase from a private deceased estate.