Collectables

A beautifully preserved 1937 first state copy of Tolkien’s 'The Hobbit' sold for £35,000 at Forum Auctions.

Shown below is one of 20 hand-coloured plates from 'Masken des Römischen Carnevals'. This was a rare and separate 1790 Weimar issue of the plates that illustrated a work by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on Roman carnivals published the previous year – an item that is itself a great rarity*.

The Wassenaar Zoo in Den Haag opened its doors in 1937 and closed in 1985, but its wonderful library, essentially untouched since the 1970s, has only now come to auction in London.

Dutch maritime charts feature in wide-ranging auction strong in travel and exploration.

Old hangars and even older tents provided two of the more successful categories in a recent three-day, 1600-lot sales week in South Cerney.

Searching online for the term ‘skirt lifter’ is probably unwise in the public domain, but an intriguing item sold at Graham Budd’s latest auction shows it is a popular collecting field.

Echoes of Lincolnshire’s history in the hugely lucrative late medieval wool trade, this wool weight, below, probably from the 16th century, was the star item at John Taylors’ (18% buyer’s premium) appropriately named Wool Mart auction rooms in Louth.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from June 4-16, 2018.

An original typescript for Boris Pasternak’s most famous novel Doctor Zhivago with handwritten corrections by the author was sold for £110,000 (plus 25% buyer’s premium) at Forum Auctions.

In the early development of motion pictures, this Kinora viewer, below, was the high end of the hugely popular ‘flip-book’ film machines.

A hundred and eighty lots in a recent West Sussex sale that offered great variety and some real rarities came from the library at West Horsley Place in Surrey.

A rare late 16th century astronomical horizontal dial, dated MDXCI (1591) and engraved with the arms and name of Pope Clement VIII, is one of the highlights of the sale series to be held by Uppsala AuktionsKammare from June 13-15.