Collectables

A Cecil Beaton sketch of Christian Dior working in his studio in Paris sold for £5200 (estimate £500-700) as part of the estate of society dress designer Ian Thomas (1929-93).

The whistle that blew after just a minute of play to signal the first penalty kick ever awarded in a World Cup Final has sold for £4200 at a London auction.

Our weekly selection from salerooms.

Musket that fired the first shot in 1775 American revolution battle appears in US saleroom.

Drizen Dickens lots notch up notable results despite some higher-value unsolds.

Bid to a record £20,000 at a Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on September 26 was a beautifully bound example of Piranesi’s Campus Martius Antiquae Urbis.

The impact of institutions on the collector-dominated market in fans was witnessed when the best-seller at a dedicated Tennants (20% buyer’s premium) auction went to a museum.

Well placed in Tyne & Wear to receive a number of miners’ safety lamps from the old Durham and Northumberland coalfields, Boldon Auction Galleries (17.5% buyer’s premium) was presented with something of a mystery in the form of the lamp pictured here.

Sold for a record $2750 (£2220) at PBA Galleries (20/15% buyer’s premium) in California on October 10 was an inscribed copy of The World Set Free, a prophetic novel by HG Wells.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

Rare medals stolen from a car and found discarded in a park 10 months later have been reunited with their owner thanks to an ATG news story.

This distinctive poster with its saw-edged image was created by the Polish designer Mieczyslaw Wasilewski for Brian De Palma’s classic 1987 crime thriller 'The Untouchables'.

First work in photographer’s classic coverage of China and its people makes £48,000.

Code locked in a briefcase for two decades, a finely preserved, 1997 first issue of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was finally released this summer after being delivered by its Lancashire owners into the hands of a Derbyshire saleroom.

More refined items are available in Chorley’s Cotswolds Country House sale in Prinknash Abbey on November 19-20 but few will attract more attention than this rare survivor from the early 1940s: a roll of loo paper featuring satirical cartoons of characters from Nazi Germany.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

Golf books do not bring as many really high prices as was once the case, but the most recent of the regular sales in this category held by a Californian saleroom did contain a couple of surprises.