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THE very fine 1950 first edition copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe seen right, with just a few nicks to the jacket skilfully repaired, was sold for £6000 to a collector by Bloomsbury Auctions on June 17, but at Sotheby’s on July 8, a complete set of the seven books that make up C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia was left unsold on an estimate of £5000-7000.

ILLUSTRATED right is a very good copy of the 1885 first edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s splendid A Child’s Garden of Verses that made £1200 (Bauman Rare Books) as part of the Alan Fortunoff library at Bloomsbury Auctions on June 4.

ONE yellow-covered rabbit book in the Dominic Winter sale of June 24, a scarce 1922 first of Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real, with its William Nicholson illustrations, was left unsold on an estimate of £4000-5000 (the original pictorial boards had been “rebacked in facsimile”) but the 1972 first of Richard Adams’ Watership Down, seen right – a copy used in the V&A’s 1977 ‘After Alice’ exhibition – made £610 in Swindon.

LINCOLNSHIRE organiser Ruth Thurman, who operates as Field Dog Fairs, holds her tenth annual antiques and collectors fair at Grimsthorpe Castle, near Bourne from July 30 to August 1.

FOUNDED in 1986, the Shelley Group is a collectors’ society dedicated to amassing and appreciating the china products made in Fenton, Staffordshire by the Wileman and Shelley companies during the 19th and 20th centuries.

THE new international trade fair for antiques, accessories, restoration and decoration, Novum Antique, planned for September 16 to 19 at Karlsruhe, near Stuttgart, has been cancelled.

A 56-sheet sketch book by Camille Pissarro, 8 x 11in (21 x 28cm), dating from his stay in Venezuela between April and August 1854, sold for €150,000 (£100,000) at Piasa (20.33/13.16% buyer's premium) on June 18.