Collectables

Perhaps established as early as 1735, the Royal Burgess Golfing Society of Edinburgh holds claim to be the oldest golfing society in the world.

This group of clothing offered at Railtons (20% buyer’s premium) in Wooler, Northumberland, on December 3, was used by geologist and explorer Lawrence Wager (1904-65) during the 1933 Everest expedition.

Arsenal FC’s familiar red jersey with white arms is instantly recognisable to football fans worldwide now. However, a pair of shirts sold at the Graham Budd (20.5% buyer’s premium) December 1-2 auction in London show an earlier look.

This silver medal sold for £3250 at Fellows (23% buyer’s premium) is one of a relatively small number awarded at the Intercalated Games in Athens in 1906.

A group of medals awarded to a First World War ‘Tommy’ sold for a mid-estimate £2400 at Kent auction house C&T (22% buyer’s premium) on October 20-21. Not that unusual, it would seem.

Catalogued as ‘fine and exceptionally rare’, a north German parade cuirass is on its way to the Art Institute of Chicago after being sold at auction.

A copy of Richard Hakluyt’s 'The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation' takes a six-figure sum at Devon sale.

Modestly estimated at $3000-5000, a richly illustrated manuscript that presents in two finely bound folio volumes a pictorial record of the ‘Costumes et Plantes de L’Hindoustan’ made $80,000 (£58,395) in a New York auction.

A Christie’s New York (25/20/14.5% buyer’s premium) online timed sale achieved six-figure bids for no fewer than eight lots and very high prices for a great many others while running up an impressive and premium-inclusive total of close on $4.75m (£3.45m).

A lawyer who likes to keep it local also has an insatiable curiosity about art and antiques.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

A remarkable garniture of weapons including the sword Napoleon is believed to have carried when he seized power in 1799 sold at an Illinois auction house.

François Nicole (b.1766), the Geneva-based pioneer of the key-wind musical box, is thought to have made around 440 boxes during his working life, but only around 60 are known today.

London auction offers fascinating bronzes from a little-appreciated collecting field.

This large-scale model of a late 19th century Australian stamp mill is signed for the Ivanhoe Gold Corporation Foundry.

A live online October 28 sale held by Forum (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) attracted a much higher than expected bid for this small and rather browned poster promising that, for one day only, visitors to The ‘Stockton House’ could view not only the preserved head of the renowned bandit Joaquin, but ‘the hand of Three Fingered Jack!’

Edition of Shakespeare’s works from 1663 heads varied selection in Cambridge.

A single-lot sale on October 19 offered an illuminated Ashkenazic prayer book that realised a premium-inclusive $8,307,000 (£6,019,565).