Collectables

Rude Rowlandson print is among the highlights of Gloucestershire auction.

Private Collections, an October 3 sale at Bonhams (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium), offered works of art from a number of sources and among lots from the estate of the late Victor, 3rd Viscount Churchill – a cousin of Winston – there were a few books.

An ensemble of fans both Oriental and Occidental is the subject of the dedicated sale organised by Coutau-Bégarie that takes place at Drouot on November 19. Examples date from the 17th century through to the early years of the 20th.

The dust jacket is far from pristine, but this 1933 first of The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas is signed and inscribed by both its subject and her lifelong partner, the writer Gertrude Stein.

Probably a puzzle to all but experts in the field, the item shown below is a transit instrument – one of three which all went well above estimates at a cameras and scientific instruments sale held by Special Auctions Services (17.5% buyer’s premium).

They may not have been the most photogenic lots in the catalogue of a recent London sale, but a couple of lots were highly attractive for their significance in the maths and measurements field.

This small-scale, 17th-18th century, Italian vanitas of a skull carved from Cararra marble measures 7½ x 9½in (19 x 24cm).

Was this the gun that John James Audubon (1785-1851) used to create the world’s most expensive natural history book?

Eleven years after John Kennedy Toole committed suicide, fellow writer Walker Percy was the man who ensured that his only book, A Confederacy of Dunces, finally got into print.

Investigation into wine storage is unusual success in computing library auction.

Catching the eye in a German auction was a fine example of the most beautiful of all piscatorial plate books.

Plastic has gained a bad name when it comes to the environment – clogging up oceans for a start.

It may seem hard to credit nowadays, but photographs of fairies at the bottom of the Cottingley (Yorkshire) garden of two young girls, produced in 1917 as a practical joke, were taken to be genuine by many people – most famously, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Vivienne Knight and Vanessa Turner are two specialist dealers in perfume bottles who will be setting out their vibrant stalls at the two-day International Perfume Bottle Association’s UK convention.

Taxidermy, having emerged in a few years from a dusty, rather unseemly subject to a rostrum hot topic, continues to flourish across the country.