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HOME Counties antiques entrepreneur James Podger is on the move again with his Great Grooms Antiques Centres. It was some eight years ago that Mr Podger saw there was a big future in the trade for smart, well-run centres featuring good dealers with quality stock.

USA: Butterfields Auctioneers are cutting their Los Angeles staff by more than half as part of a major restructuring programme that will lead to a greater focus on San Francisco.

The final ceramics auction in London last year was the glass sale held at Sotheby’s Olympia on December 18. The top priced lot at £50,000 was this damaged but rare North German covered goblet of c.1675, painted and signed by Johann Anton Carli of Andermach am Rhein with a scene of Christ and the woman of Samaria.

A NEW survey of US auctioneers shows distinct trends developing in online auctions that should help them establish their presence long term as part of the selling process for antiques.

The 102 lots of European ceramics that rounded off Christie’s (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) December 13 furnishing sale at King Street had, despite a degree of softness to the Meissen market, a generally high take-up for that factory, with 18 of the 25 lots of tablewares and figures changing hands and some strong individual results.

If 1930s Blackpool looks like a British version of the Italian Riviera it is because this poster advertisement, right, was designed by a Neapolitan watercolourist, Fortunino Matania, for the LMS railway company whose trains serviced the Lancashire resort.

USA : It was no surprise that the star lot in a star-studded Americana sale at Christie’s New York on January 18 and 19 was the Lafayette-Washington pair of saddle pistols which fetched $1.8m (£1,285,715) and established a new world auction record for a firearm.