Collectables

Very much the surprise of an online sale held by Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) was a lot presenting incomplete fragments of 'An Almanacke and Prognosticatyon'… for the year 1552.

An unexpected star turn of a recent Norfolk sale was a job lot of works from the library of the late Ron Fiske of Morningthorpe Manor, an East Anglian collector whose books a Norfolk auction house first started dispersing a few years years ago.

One of the many memorable scenes in Charles Dickens’ 'Bleak House' was the portrayal of the apparent spontaneous combustion of Mr Krook, leaving “the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes”.

Second-dibs sales at regional salerooms – those that follow after a major London auctioneer has cherry-picked the contents of a stately country house – can sometimes acquire the slighting epithet of ‘crumbs from a rich man’s table’.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

A momentous letter of July 6, 1776, in which President of Congress John Hancock announced the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, was the most expensive lot in a printed and manuscript Americana sale on January 27.

Early-17th century Lithuanian plan sold alongside companion Dnieper river details

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

The vintage contents of a railway station buffet offered in East Yorkshire were not the most upmarket pieces – nothing made more than £2000 – but more than 400 people packed the room and online bids came from India, the US and Finland. It gave veteran auctioneer Andy Spicer only his second white-glove sell-out in 35 years on the rostrum.

With tripartite appeal to football fans of England, Wales and – most importantly as it turned out – of Millwall FC, a historic shirt was a winner at Hansons’ ( 20% buyer’s premium) sporting sale.

Having been heavily criticised for its antiquated designs at the World Exhibition of 1900 in Paris, the Meissen porcelain factory commissioned avant-garde designers to produce more vibrant pieces.

Just under 600 lots in the extensive March 16-20 auction at Künker in Osnabrück come from the Samel collection. This highly important collection was put together by Josef Samel and his sister Angela Arluk, who were born in Poland, but settled in Munich after the war.

A silver medal on offer at Gorny & Mosch in Munich on March 9-10 commemorates the last pitched battle fought on the British mainland.

The medal awarded to Celtic footballer Steve Chalmers who scored the winning goal as they became the first British club to win the European Cup in 1967 is coming to auction.

An eyewitness account of the trial of two elderly widows on charges of witchcraft proved one of the more successful lots in a truly Out of the Ordinary sale held in Essex on February 11.

'La Navigation du Roy d’Ecosse' by the French cartographer Nicolas de Nicolay (1517-83) is said to be the oldest accurate map of coastal Scotland.

This mid-19th century oil of a bare-knuckle prize fight is thought to depict a famous bout between Victorian boxers William Perry (1819-88) and Tom Sayers (1826-65).

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.