Collectables

Bought for just £40 earlier in the year, two rare bronze buttons designed by Alberto Giacometti for Elsa Schiaparelli hammered for £48,000 at the latest Modern Decorative Art & Design sale at Bonhams Knightsbridge.

An Adelie penguin egg collected by Herbert Ponting (1871-1935) on the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition came for sale in Nantwich on January 8.

A scarce copy of Beatrix Potter’s 'The Fairy Caravan' sold for £3000 in Tennants’ (24% buyer’s premium) Books, Maps & Manuscripts Sale.

This carved wooden tobacconist figure or ‘Cigar Indian’ came to Ewbank’s (25% buyer’s premium) auction in Send, Surrey, by descent through the vendor’s family.

As he died more than a decade before the medium really took off, very few photographs of the American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) exist.

A rare first edition of Enid Blyton’s first published book, Child Whispers, hammered at £1400 in the Thomson Roddick (20% buyer’s premium) book sale on December 4.

A handsome 19th century brass boat tiller hammered for $15,000 (£11,235) at Zevantiques (25% buyer’s premium) in Hallandale, Florida.

His image appears in seemingly every possible format, from postage stamps to chocolates and biscuit tins.

Not that many footballers can be “as deeply woven into Leicester City and Scarborough football history as Colin Appleton (1936-2021)”, it is true.

Did you know that Great Britain are still the Olympic tug of war champions? The City of London Police Team competed for GB in the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, winning gold – and the category has not appeared since at a Games.

Auctioneer finds out there are two variations of the 1875 guide, but a record is achieved nevertheless

Prompted by the uniform penny post and the new printing process of chromolithography, the Victorian era was the heyday of the Christmas card.

Lurking among the equestrian portraits in a sale held by The Sporting Art Auction (17.5% buyer’s premium) was an atypical work by Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959).

Exhibitor at Welsh fair turned her passion for tokens into a sales success as part of her antiques business

For more than 40 years I have owned a bundle of 18th and 19th century Scottish family letters.

Little is known about Soiree Cigarettes or the firm behind them and it is only thanks to the collectable cards it issued in Mauritius that its name appears in web search results today.

“Very few things make me that excited. But this was a really exciting thing.” Tom Sage Jr’s faith was rewarded in September.

Once renowned for achievements wearing goalkeeping gloves, Pat Jennings (b.1945) achieved an auction white-glove result when his memorabilia collection sold out at Budds (24% buyer’s premium).

As ruler of an empire on which the sun never set, Queen Victoria adopted the Indian practice of giving Kashmiri shawls as gifts to visiting dignitaries and coming-of-age and wedding presents to her friends at court.

In February in New York, Sotheby’s will offer for sale one of the most important illustrated Hebrew Prayerbooks to come to market: The Rothschild Vienna Mahzor.