Collectables

The best-seller lists these days will always include a good number of explosive memoirs written by special forces veterans and their heroic stories usually also mean high interest at auction.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from March 11-31, 2020.

Before British female nurses could even help with the wounded they faced a battle to be accepted, as the story behind a medal winner reveals.

“Something awful. Never witnessed anything like it before. After a bombardment of a week the Germans mounted their own trenches and the infantry reckon that every German had a machine gun…”

As the Standard Catalogue of British Coins points out, this tiny denomination, the George VI silver threepence dated 1945 , essentially marks the end of the silver coinage and the beginning of modern coins made of copper-nickel and brass.

Shown below is a plate from A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pyrates… sold at Lyon & Turnbull (25% buyer’s premium) on February 19

A highlight of the first sale of this year held by Poster Auctions International (20% buyer’s premium) in New York on February 23 was a rare 1902 set of four poster panels designed by Alphonse Mucha.

An historic archive belonging to the engineer who oversaw the design of the Mulberry Harbours in the Second World War comes to auction in Cumbria later this month.

Said to date from the 12th-14th century, an incomplete and dampstained Middle Eastern medical manuscript sold for £70,000 at Bellmans (22% buyer’s premium) on February 22.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

List of deaths is timely reminder that outbreaks are nothing new

Very much the surprise of an online sale held by Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) was a lot presenting incomplete fragments of 'An Almanacke and Prognosticatyon'… for the year 1552.

An unexpected star turn of a recent Norfolk sale was a job lot of works from the library of the late Ron Fiske of Morningthorpe Manor, an East Anglian collector whose books a Norfolk auction house first started dispersing a few years years ago.

One of the many memorable scenes in Charles Dickens’ 'Bleak House' was the portrayal of the apparent spontaneous combustion of Mr Krook, leaving “the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes”.

Second-dibs sales at regional salerooms – those that follow after a major London auctioneer has cherry-picked the contents of a stately country house – can sometimes acquire the slighting epithet of ‘crumbs from a rich man’s table’.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.