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THE first part of the library of books on gems and jewellery formed by Henry Polissack, a dealer in antique jewellery who turned his pursuit of works for his own reference collection into a specialist book business, was held in March 2003, but while the Pt. II sale held by Swanns on May 27 of this year was not up to the standard of that first offering, it did contain much of interest.

FOSSILS, whose decorative qualities in either antique or contemporary settings, have made them a regular feature of Sotheby’s garden sales at Billingshurst, opened the May event with 100 lots. Although dealers have become interested in the genre (there are, for example, now stands selling natural history at Olympia), private buyers took the top offerings including the best seller, a detail of which is shown right.

THE very earliest English porcelain has long held sway in the market, but one feature of Part I of the mammoth Zorensky Worcester collection sold by Bonhams in March was the high prices paid for some of the late 1760s and early 1770s underglaze blue ground tablewares.

HIGHLIGHT of the Collectors’ Sale conducted by Keys (10% buyer’s premium) in Aylsham was this silver-mounted ivory flute by Monzani.

VALUED at £1000-1500 in a June 29 sale at Bonhams is a bound manuscript entitled ‘Hieroglyphica Mexicana, or, an Introduction into the Origin, Nature and Meaning of the Ancient Paintings by the Semi-Civilized Nations of America, with Sketches of their Languages, History, Arts & Sciences’.

A TYPED first draft of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in which he uses real names of characters and places, not the pseudonyms of the finished book, carried a $100,000-150,000 estimate in a May 27 modern literature sale held in San Francisco by PBA Galleries but it joined a long list of unsold lots.

EDINBURGH dealer Andrew Fletcher, who as Twentieth Century Antiques specialises in original works from 1920-1970, normally trades via his website or by appointment, but for the duration of the Edinburgh Festival he is taking space at Concrete Butterfly, a large complex at 317-319 Cowgate in the Old Town which retails furniture and interior design.