News

USA: AUCTIONEERS Skinner Inc. are bidding to capture a larger slice of the top end of the market by moving their flagship American Furniture and Decorative Arts department out of the small town of Bolton and into Boston.

The AXA insurance group have joined the battle for Drouot with an offer believed to be worth €82m (£51m), comfortably exceeding the €69m (£43m) proposed by Barclays Private Equity and the €64m (£40m) by ABN-Amro earlier this year.

AS New York’s Asia Week came to a close last week, early reports suggest the market for Oriental work is internationally still very strong and that in this field at least business is back to normal in the American capital.

Museums are well known as the protectors of age, but now we have an example of how age is to prove the downfall of such an institution. The silver lining to this cloud is that it provides a unique opportunity for the trade and collectors.

The children’s books section of a Bloomsbury Book Auctions sale of March 7 amounted to no more than a dozen lots, but included several good things and a few interesting results.

The March 13 sale held by Dix Noonan Webb (17.625 per cent buyer’s premium) was one of the best general sales for quite some years. There is a general shortage of interesting material and the clientele is clearly well aware of this. The room was packed, there was hardly a seat for latecomers and prices were accordingly buoyant. This is very good news for the trade as a whole.

Luxury sets were a feature of the Pacific Book Auctions sale of February 7 and seen left are sample volumes of a 48-volume set of the works of Alexandre Dumas, one of 1000 ‘Editions de Medicis’ sets published in Boston c.1900 and here sumptuously bound in dark green morocco gilt with red inlays to the covers, which reached $13,000 (£9155).