Collectables

A FOUR-page, colour illustrated feature in the April 25 issue of The Sunday Times Magazine will have done nothing to harm the saleroom prospects of a collection of 13 love letters written in the period January 1881-June 1882 by the actress Lillie Langtry, “the adored pin-up whose affairs rocked Victorian Britain”, and on May 13 Cumbrian auctioneers Mitchells of Cockermouth sold the lot for £5000.

EARLIER this year, when Comic Book Postal Auctions sold a copy of Beano No.1 for a record £11,000, I briefly looked into the reasons why Dandy, which preceded Beano by several months, is not quite so avidly pursued and looked forward to seeing just how much the next Dandy No. 1 to come to auction might make.

AS a follow-up to last week’s report on the Conan Doyle collection sold at King Street in May, I bring belated news of The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.

THERE was scarcely a facet of numismatic endeavour which was not represented in Baldwin’s (15% buyer’s premium) sale of May 4 and 5 (2018 lots).

AN autograph sale held by Swanns on April 29 included 11 lots from the George Armstrong Custer collection formed by the late Dr. Elizabeth Atwood, a vet and well-known Custer buff. Seen right is a copy print of a larger image by Timothy O’Sullivan, inscribed “Truly yours G.A. Custer”, which sold for $14,000 (£7955).

FOSSILS, whose decorative qualities in either antique or contemporary settings, have made them a regular feature of Sotheby’s garden sales at Billingshurst, opened the May event with 100 lots. Although dealers have become interested in the genre (there are, for example, now stands selling natural history at Olympia), private buyers took the top offerings including the best seller, a detail of which is shown right.

HIGHLIGHT of the Collectors’ Sale conducted by Keys (10% buyer’s premium) in Aylsham was this silver-mounted ivory flute by Monzani.

VALUED at £1000-1500 in a June 29 sale at Bonhams is a bound manuscript entitled ‘Hieroglyphica Mexicana, or, an Introduction into the Origin, Nature and Meaning of the Ancient Paintings by the Semi-Civilized Nations of America, with Sketches of their Languages, History, Arts & Sciences’.

A TYPED first draft of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in which he uses real names of characters and places, not the pseudonyms of the finished book, carried a $100,000-150,000 estimate in a May 27 modern literature sale held in San Francisco by PBA Galleries but it joined a long list of unsold lots.

THE 463 lots that made up the first portion of science books from the Earl of Macclesfield’s library at Shirburn Castle, sold by Sotheby’s on June 10, covered just the letters A-C, but the contents of this extraordinary library, virtually untouched since the 18th century, are such that even this starter helping raised a premium-inclusive total of £3.57m.

TOP read in a May 20 sale held by Freemans of Philadelphia was one of 90 sets of the 37-vol. ‘Memorial’ edition of the writings of Mark Twain published by Harpers in 1929, which, in original three-quarter crushed green levant morocco gilt and marbled boards, sold at $12,000 (£6820).

ALTHOUGH catalogued as a late 18th century fruitwood apple form tea caddy, this finely turned and carved 5 1/2in (13cm) high vessel sold by Biddle & Webb (15% buyer’s premium) on April 1 was more accurately a melon.

PICTURED here are four very finely-preserved 1950s Bassett-Lowke 0 Gauge clockwork locomotives that were offered by toys and arms and armour specialists Wallis & Wallis (15% buyer’s premium) of Lewes on May 4.

THIS walking stick, thought to have once belonged to John Adams, the longest surviving of the Bounty mutineers, will be on offer at Sworders' (15% buyer’s premium) Summer Country House sale on July 20-21. It is made from a vine found on Pitcairn Island, where Adams and eight of the other mutineers famously settled after landing there on January 23, 1790.

A FIRE that struck three storage warehouses in Vauxhall has damaged lots consigned to the classic car and automobilia auctioneers Coys for their July 3 ‘Jaguar Legend’ sale at Chiswick House.

SPECIALIST firearms saleroom, Rock Island Auctions of Moline, Illinois, sold over 2800 lots for a total of $5.3m (£3m) in their April 17-19 event. Among the higher priced weapons were three prototype or experimental pistols by Mauser and Walther.

IN the 18th century, it was widely believed that meteorites found on Earth were pieces of the moon that had been blasted into space by volcanic eruption. We now know that almost all meteorites come from the asteroid belt and that it was the pummelling that the moon received in the early years of the formation of our solar system that allowed some chunks of moon rock to escape the moon’s gravitational influence and, periodically, find their way to Earth.

TWO BOX files of Ford manufacturers’ catalogues, advertising material and other ephemera of 1920s and ’30s motoring interest brought a bid of £1550 in a May 19 sale held by Thomson Roddick & Medcalf and the only other lot to reach four figures was a collection of some 370 postcards relating almost entirely to Ulverston and Furness.

IN a May 18 sale held by Tennants of Leyburn, a copy of the 1902, first trade edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, bearing a neat inscription that was added 90 years later, was lotted with a copy of Jack and the Beanstalk in English hexameters by Hallam Tennyson and illustrated by Randolph Caldecott [1886?] and sold for £1000.

DECORATED manuscripts known as fraktur, made in various parts of America but primarily associated with Pennsylvania’s German communities, are something very little known in Britain, but on the home auction scene they are big money spinners indeed, as the example from an April 24 Americana sale held by Freemans of Philadelphia shows.