Collectables

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from September 15-26, 2020.

Napoleon’s view after first meeting on St Helena did not improve on closer acquaintance

Sara Hughes is delighted that her Vintage, Antiques and Militaria Fair at Petersfield’s Festival Hall is finally going ahead on Sunday, September 27, with 50 dealers.

Always likely to produce one of the sale’s best results, a 1798 first of Thomas Malthus’ 'Essay on the Principle of Population' duly led the bidding in a recent German sale.

In 1916 around 500 copies of the historic ‘Proclamation of the Irish Republic’ were printed, of which today just 30 or so survivors are recorded.

This c.1912 poster from the Buffalo Bill-Pawnee Bill film Company advertises a three-reel silent film by Paul Panzer on the life of the Wild West showman and depicts him on horseback with a Native American family and a tepee.

A Victorian taxidermy case of four New Zealand birds by Rowland Ward of Piccadilly sold for an unexpected £7000 (estimate £100-200) at Windsor Auctions (18% buyer’s premium) in Berkshire.

Bid to €10,000 (£9100) in a timed online sale at Fonsie Mealy (25/20% buyers premium) this summer was a two-volume collection of medical and other receipts compiled by Mrs Mary Leadbeater (1758-1826).

On September 12 Brunk Auctions of Asheville, North Carolina, is holding a single-owner sale comprising the estate of William N Banks Junior from his Georgia property, Bankshaven.

Appropriately enough, the very first lot offered in a sale called Eureka! was one that focused on scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, was an autograph manuscript of seven pages of annotated design drawings by Thomas Edison relating to his work on light bulbs.

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

Though the first human in-socket artificial eyes were created by Venetian glassmakers c.16th century, the earliest evidence of ocular prosthesis was found in a female burial plot in Shahr-I Sokhta, Iran – dating back to 2900-2800 BC.

So-called ‘Black Forest’ carvings don’t get much better than this walking stick stand modelled as a seated hound next to a tree stump offered by Hannam’s (23% buyer’s premium) in Selborne, Hampshire.

Manuscript was brought to Italy from Constantinople and later printed in Vicenza

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from September 8-19, 2020.

This Machine Man lithographed tinplate Japanese battery powered robot is the rarest of the post war group of so called ‘Gang of Five’ robots made by Masudaya.