Collectables

Dreweatts in Newbury has for sale this fine Victorian ‘weather station’ with a full provenance and a portrait of its former owner.

Georg Merz and Joseph Mahler took over the Utzschneider & Fraunhofer company in 1839.

Trebling its high estimate in a sale in Surrey was a large, in fact elephant folio-sized Atlas Royal… from c.1733

The slide rule shown here belonged to Dhunjeebhoy Rustomjee, who came from a fine line of Indian master ship builders in ancestry.

English history and law were the mainstays of an excellent collection sold in North Yorkshire

The prototype B1 Vulcan first flew in 1952 and it is a sign of the design’s longevity and durability that the last of these bombers was taken out of service only in 1984.

Rachel Toy’s love of vintage started with trips to car boots sales with her mum in the 1980s and ignited a particular interest in 1960s and 1970s homeware. Today she runs Rachel’s Vintage Retro based in Pitstone in east Buckinghamshire.

The record business enjoyed by London’s coin auction houses during Covid lockdowns largely continued last year.

A cache of material from descendants of the Starbuck family, a Quaker whaling family influential in both the abolitionist movement and the founding of Nantucket as a whaling centre, was the highlight of Catherine Southon’s sale on February 8.

Produced six years after the much more common 1847 dated Gothic Crown of which 8000 were made, the 1853 Gothic Crown was struck only in a very limited number.

Struck c.1500 in Lisbon from Guinean gold provided by the explorations of Vasco da Gama, the 10 cruzados piece or Portugués do ouro of Manuel I (1495-1521) is a coin synonymous with the Age of Discovery.

To one side of this gold aureus struck in Rome in 180-83 is a sensually draped portrait of the goddess Venus.

The sale at Hansons (25% buyer’s premium) in Teddington on January 28 included what was marketed as ‘Queen Victoria’s post box’.

This single-page letter offered on January 19 by Mellors & Kirk (24% buyer’s premium) tells the remarkable story of Abdul Rahman Ibrahima Sori (1762-1829).

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

The unexpected but very welcome increase in demand that the market experienced amid Covid lockdowns continued in 2022 as restrictions eased – and auction houses are optimistic about another strong performance this year

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Henry III (1216-72) issued his ‘gold penny’ for probably less than a year from August 16, 1357.

Instituted by Maria Dickin, the founder of the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA), in 1943, the Dickin Medal has been awarded on 71 occasions – 32 of them going to pigeons, 34 to dogs, four to horses and one to a cat.