Collectables

Doubling its mid-estimate to sell at £50,000, one of the top lots in a sale of September 7 was Paulo Forlani’s Il Disegno del discoperto della nova Franza…

This camera script produced for the ‘Waldorf Salad’ episode from the second series of Fawlty Towers was offered by East Bristol Auctions (19% buyer’s premium) in a timed online sale that ended on August 23,

In 1902 the author Booker T Washington sent a typed and handwritten letter to the Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie regarding his recently published work.

Bid to £9500 rather than the suggested £150-200 was a copy of the first, and possibly only edition ever seen at auction of William Knight’s A Concordance Axiomaticall…

The ‘property of a lady’, this concertina-style wallet book by Beatrix Potter, 'The Story of Miss Moppet', is a first edition published by Frederick Warne & Co, London & New York, 1906.

The principal portion of a two-part sale conducted by Sotheby’s New York included not one, but three lots that brought seven-figure bids.

Coinex, the most important event on the British calender for many serious coin collectors, opens at the Biltmore Hotel in Mayfair on September 23-24.

Thomas Dangerfield (c.1650-85) was a notorious thief, counterfeiter, highwayman and conspirator who is chiefly remembered for his role in falsely accusing British Roman Catholics as part of the ‘Popish Plot’ of 1678.

Sold online for a record $20,000 (£16,340) at the former Butterfields, now Bonhams Los Angeles (27.5/26/20/14.5% buyer’s premium) salerooms as part of the David Lloyd collection of modern literature was a 1909 first edition of Frank L Baum’s 'The Road to Oz'.

Newcastle auction house Anderson & Garland is holding The Comics Auction on September 28-29.

Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Achaemenid empire delivered into his hands a vast wealth.

The Premier Sale held by St James’s Auctions on September 22 includes this gold half guinea token with a ‘phoenix from the flames’ motif made for Wilson and Younge of Sheffield in 1812.

Sold at Bonhams Skinner (27.5/26/20/14.5% buyer’s premium) was a 1584 first edition of Reginald Scot’s 'The Discoverie of Witchcraft….'

The October 13 sale of Early Printed Books at Swann Auction Galleries in New York will feature part two of the library of Ken Rapoport: English literature, tales of chivalry from the Renaissance, and more Shakespeare, Chaucer, Cervantes, Donne, and others.

This copy of 'Hansel and Gretel', 1925, with 12 tipped-in colour plates by the Danish artist Kay Nielsen (1886-1957), is one of 600 numbered copies (numbered 16) signed by the artist, in the original publisher’s pictorial cloth.

Freeman’s September 21 Books and Manuscripts auction, in Pennsylvania is led by an ‘extremely rare’ first edition of 'New Englands First Fruits' (estimate $20,000-30,000), a 1643 account of Puritan evangelisation in New England.

On October 12 Gloucestershire saleroom Dominic Winter is offering a first English edition of Picasso: Toreros by Jaime Sabartés, London & Monte Carlo: Anton Zwemmer & André Sauret, 1961, estimated at £1000-1500.

Books related to Polar explorers are among the highlights of Bonhams’ Travel & Exploration sale on September 20.

Sold at $440,000 (£371,000), the most expensive lot in a three-day auction at Heritage (25% buyer’s premium) was a logbook kept on the B29 Superfortress bomber that dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945.