Sotheby's

An American library on the history of computing formed by the late Erwin Tomash provided the new season’s first major sale.

They won’t show it on the rostrum and probably not with clients but auction house professionals do have a likeness for particular artists.

The profile of Scottish potter Jennifer Lee (b. 1956) received a £50,000 boost at the Royal Centre for Design in Kensington this summer when she won the Loewe Craft Prize 2018 with her abstract stoneware vessel illustrated here.

Proof of a burgeoning market, a series of stellar results for British studio pottery were posted at the ‘Made in Britain’ sale conducted by Sotheby’s on Bond Street.

Following on from last week’s 19th and 20th century literature round-up, this second selection focuses on earlier works sold in London and New York during the summer.

Ahead of a threatened import tax, overseas consignments of Chinese art were among the best sellers in the September Asian art sales in New York.

Real rarities and record breakers are among items that feature in this first of a couple of reviews of more literary lots from the wealth of summer sales. Here the focus is principally on works of the last 200 years or so – and includes such diverse characters as Hugh the Heron and the Invisible Man.

Posters advertising the first-ever public screening of a film, which took place in Paris in 1895, have hardly ever emerged outside France. While one is known in an American collection, the appearance of another at Sotheby’s latest online film posters auction understandably caused some excitement.

Wide-ranging Lyell family archive brings high prices across the board in London.

“Isn’t it possible that the Irish could be just as brilliant in the visual arts as they have been in music and literature?”

Sotheby’s is to test the temperature of the market for Japanese art with its first dedicated sale in London for more than a decade.

On September 18-19 Sotheby’s will offer an American library on the history of computing formed by the late Erwin Tomash (1921-2012), a sale that runs to 944 lots in all but is divided into two sections.

Briefly noted in ATG No 2353 was a copy of Through the Looking Glass sold for £30,000 at Sotheby’s (25/20/12.9%) on July 10, where it was part of the eighth and latest sale of books from ‘The Library of an English Bibliophile’.