Collectables

The so-called Elcho bayonet was designed for the Martini-Henry rifle in 1870 by Lord Elcho, the 10th Earl of Wemyss & March.

Edition of Macbeth that once belonged to actor Charlton Heston.

A collection of Japanese arms and armour is a key feature of Cowan’s arms and armour auction to be held in Cincinnati on September 2.

Almost 2.5 million of these Second World War British posters with the now famous slogan were printed in 12 different sizes.

The two ink drawings reproduced here both made substantial sums in a June 27 sale of comic strip artwork held in Paris by Artcurial.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

Solid selling punctuated by a number of estimate-eclipsing bids made the July 17-18 sale a very welcome return to business for Tennants (20% buyer’s premium).

Sold at £140,000 in the first of two early manuscript sales held by Bloomsbury Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on July 8 was a lot featured in the front page story in ATG No 2447.

Featured in Previews, ATG No 2449, was an amusing illustration of the Vacuum Tube, a proposed new means of mass transport from the pages of the Glasgow Looking Glass, a publication that has come to be widely regarded as the world’s first comic.

Estimated at £100-200 but sold for £2800 at Thomas Watson (25% buyer’s premium) in Darlington on August was a set of four Worcester parian menu holders.

Firsts of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice have made as much as £115,000* at auction.

Some aspects of the traditional antiques market continue to perform with zest – and ‘folk art’ is among them.

This Royal Navy Reserve officer’s sword owned by Robert Erskine Childers was estimated at €3000-5000 in a recent auction by Mullen’s (20/12.5% buyer’s premium) in Bray, Co Dublin. The scabbard throat of the Victorian 1827-pattern sword is engraved 'RE Childers'.

A number of higher-priced lots featured in a sale held by Hindman (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) of Chicago this summer, where fine binding was very much in evidence on both individual volumes and sets.

Spread over two days and running to 600 lots, a very mixed sale held by Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) included Oscar Wilde’s 'The Importance of being Earnest' as one of the literary high spots.

Arnold ‘Jake’ Johnson’s library of thousands of volumes covering travel, big game hunting – the focus of the three lots featured here – sporting and other fields is being dispersed by Doyle (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) in various live and online auctions in New York.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions, August 18-September 3, 2020.

Collected by a Scottish enthusiast, 26 railway station totems – the enamel signs introduced across the UK by newly nationalised British Rail in 1948 – gained UK-wide interest at McTear’s (24% buyer’s premium) in Glasgow.