Collectables

Firsts of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice have made as much as £115,000* at auction.

Some aspects of the traditional antiques market continue to perform with zest – and ‘folk art’ is among them.

This Royal Navy Reserve officer’s sword owned by Robert Erskine Childers was estimated at €3000-5000 in a recent auction by Mullen’s (20/12.5% buyer’s premium) in Bray, Co Dublin. The scabbard throat of the Victorian 1827-pattern sword is engraved 'RE Childers'.

A number of higher-priced lots featured in a sale held by Hindman (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) of Chicago this summer, where fine binding was very much in evidence on both individual volumes and sets.

Spread over two days and running to 600 lots, a very mixed sale held by Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) included Oscar Wilde’s 'The Importance of being Earnest' as one of the literary high spots.

Arnold ‘Jake’ Johnson’s library of thousands of volumes covering travel, big game hunting – the focus of the three lots featured here – sporting and other fields is being dispersed by Doyle (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) in various live and online auctions in New York.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions, August 18-September 3, 2020.

Collected by a Scottish enthusiast, 26 railway station totems – the enamel signs introduced across the UK by newly nationalised British Rail in 1948 – gained UK-wide interest at McTear’s (24% buyer’s premium) in Glasgow.

Nestlé, today a Swiss multinational corporation, was a much smaller company when this rare lithographed showcard was made.

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

A mid-16th century 54-bore south German breech-loading wheel-lock holster pistol trebled its top estimate to take £75,000 at a recent sale held by Thomas Del Mar.

The linocuts produced by artists from the Grosvenor School provided an ideal medium to portray speed and movement in the inter-war machine age – and were perfect for sport subjects too. Those created by Sybil Andrews, such as her classic speedway image, are the best known on this theme.

Victor Mee Auctions’ Irish Pub Memorabilia & Collectibles sale on August 12 will offer Irish football and hurling lovers and collectors the chance to bid on three advertising figurines, estimated at €200-450 each.

While Manchester United and early FA Cup match programmes often make the big money at auction, a group on offer at a West Sussex saleroom showed that far less famous names can also make the running.

Each bearing estimates of £300-400, two lots in a summer online auction held by Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) brought substantially higher rewards.

Copy of newspaper containing what became the US national anthem makes sale appearance