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INNOVATIVE Oxfordshire dealers The Country Seat may be best known as furniture specialists, but they are increasingly turning their focus towards 19th and 20th century design.

CAPE Cod auctioneers Eldred’s of East Dennis had a busy August schedule and results from their series of Asian and Americana sales will appear in future US Selections, but seen here are two of the 970 lots found in an August 12-13 sale of Fine & Decorative Art.

A POSTER sale held by Swanns of New York on August 4 was strong on recruitment and propaganda posters of WWI and WWII. A condition-A copy of “the best known American poster of all time”, the famous Uncle Sam image of 1917 seen top right, was sold at $9000 (£4950). Based on the well-known British poster featuring Lord Kitchener, it was originally produced by illustrator James Montgomery Flagg as a magazine cover and is in fact a self-portrait of the artist.

SOMETHING in the region of $1.2m (£660,000) was taken at a July 31-August 1 sale held by the Neal Auction Company of New Orleans and two 20th century photographs (one reproduced right) were among the more successful lots.

PLENTY of art and antiques on offer around the capital this month but the imaginative Mayfair tribal art specialists the Gordon Reece Gallery have come up with a different take on the decorative, with a selling exhibition they hold at 16 Clifford Street, London W1 until October 2.

IN 1784, settlers in what is now North Carolina and eastern Tennessee put together a plan for a new state that was to be named in honour of Benjamin Franklin.

RIGHT: though I suspected a sub-text, this black letter broadside, printed “at London in the Olde Baily by Richard Lant for Thomas Porefut in Paules Churchyard at the sygne of Lucrese”, seems to offer a straightforward account (in a translation by Renolde Olyver) of a violent storm and consequent disasters that took place at Mechlin [Malines], near Antwerp, in August 1546.