Auctioneers

THE expansion of Bloomsbury Auctions continues apace with the announcement that they are moving into the chess and games market.

THE large sums of money rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia collectors are prepared to part with for a complete set of Beatles autographs inevitably means the market is peppered with fakes. The watertight provenance of an early Beatles extended play record, Twist and Shout, Parlophone, 1963, signed to the sleeve by the Fab Four, was key to its success at Biddle & Webb’s (15% buyer’s premium) 511-lot sale of toys and juvenilia in Birmingham on May 21.

SOLD for $1300 (£730) in a May 20 sale held by Freemans of Philadelphia was a set in original wrappers of all eight issues of The Savoy (1896) with its cover designs and other illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley.

EMMA was the leading lady in a May 19 sale held by Dreweatt Neate of Newbury, an 1816 first of Jane Austen’s novel selling at £6000. Catalogued as bound in both contemporary half red morocco and later boards, it retained the half title to Vol. III only and showed a little spotting and staining. It also bore the booklabels of Gilbert Bethune of Balfour.

ONE of the Thirty-One Original Etchings of Views of Norfolk by John Crome, a portfolio collection issued in 1821 by Freemans of Norwich, that sold for £3200 to an American collector in a Christie’s South Kensington sale of April 29.

IN an unfinished craft binding of crushed red morocco with full doublures, the lower cover with borders of inlaid blue and gilt pointillé cornerpiece, a paper copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer of 1896 was sold for £17,000 to an American dealer in a May 6 sale held by Bonhams.

BOUND in half calf gilt and marbled boards, the three-vol., 1813 second edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that sold for £4600 in a May 21 sale held by John Bellman of Billingshurst bore the pencil initials H.D. for Horace Darwin (Charles Darwin’s son) and his bookplates were to be found in a copy of the 1818, four-vol. first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in a similar but less well-preserved binding that sold at £2500.

THE estimates were rather modest, but prices paid for some of the Biggles books offered as part of a May 21 sale held by Keys of Aylsham bode well for the Biggles collection that Dominic Winter are to sell on June 24. In Aylsham, Hamilton copies of The Black Peril of c.1936, in soiled blue cloth, and The Cruise of the Condor, an undated Ace series title with adverts for Spring 1937, were valued at around £40 apiece but sold for £1050 and £480 respectively.

AN undated medical volume offered as part of a May 8 antiques sale held by Fieldings of Stourbridge brought a bid of £430.

Comprising 60 oban panels that form 20 triptychs, a concertina form, Senso-e album of c.1895 that sold for £3200 as part of a May 27 sale of original drawings and watercolours, prints and maps held by Bloomsbury Auctions is a record of events of the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 in which Japan’s modernised armed forces gained a swift and comparatively easy victory over the much larger Chinese forces.

THE jacket was torn with loss and four of the five paintbox pictures had been partly coloured, but a copy of The New Adventures of Rupert, the 1936, first Rupert annual, was sold at £580 in a May 13 sale held by Greenslade Taylor Hunt.

AT the tail-end of a 500-lot sale of Russian pictures and other works of art held by Sotheby’s on May 26 was a small selection of photograph albums and books, two of which are illustrated and briefly described here.

A MAY 11 sale held by Sotheby’s Olympia to dispose of property from the collections of the late Lord and Lady Menuhin included a collection of material by and about the American writer Willa Cather, who was a great friend of Marutha Menuhin, Yehudi’s mother, and a close friend to all the Menuhin children. She also wrote many letters to Marutha, but all of these were burned after her death, in accordance with the writer’s will.

A POSTCARD sent by Joyce to the publisher Elkin Mathews sold for €12,000 (£8170) in a May 18 sale held by Mealy’s in Dublin.

TWO records of witchcraft trials in 17th century Lübeck were among the more successful lots in an April 19 sale held by Swanns of New York.

THIS punting scene by Whistler is one of some 3000 additional original and reproduction etchings and engravings, mostly full-page and many mounted and titled in ink as well as being mounted, where possible opposite the relevant text, that were to be found in an extra-illustrated 1880, third edition of Philip G. Hamerton’s Etchings & Etchers seen at Bonhams on May 6.

IN a general sale held by Bloomsbury Auctions on May 13, a copy of J.M. Richards’ High Street of 1938 that was signed on the front free endpaper by W.J. Bassett-Lowke, the proprietor of one of the shops illustrated in the work’s coloured litho illustrations by Eric Ravilious, was sold for £1150.

The highlight of the sale conducted by Mallams of Bocardo House, Oxford on May 26 was this rare mahogany Windsor chair (shown right) consigned for sale from a deceased estate in the Cherwell Valley of North Oxfordshire.

THE catalogue at Hampton and Littlewood’s (15% buyer's premium) April 28-29 sale may have been a model of its kind but even Homer nods… and Mr Hampton did so while “late-night cataloguing” this sentimental little group, right.

THE West Midlands auctioneers Fieldings (12.5% buyer’s premium) are making something of a habit of getting impressive prices for market-fresh watercolours by the Newlyn School painter Walter Langley (1852-1922).