Auctioneers

Well-provenanced Chinese works of art posted strong sums in what was a workmanlike, rather than spectacular, Asian art season for the leading regional auctioneers.

One of the most comprehensive and best-preserved football memorabilia collections auctioneer Graham Budd (17.5% buyer’s premium) has ever handled netted a hammer total of £107,000 for a remarkable 47 lots including medals and caps on November 14-15.

"If it hadn't been for the Blue Boxes, there would have been no Apple. I'm 100% sure of that." So said Steve Jobs of the electronic devices that simulate operators by generating the tones used by a telephone operator’s dialling console, and were typically used from the 1950s by so-called ‘phone phreakers’ to avail themselves of free calls.

A Sioux Indian beaded knife sheath from the Battle of Little Bighorn could be the highlight of Skinner’s sale of American Indian and Ethnographic art to be held on December 2 in Boston.

Theodor Geisel, writer, cartoonist and artist, is better known as Dr Seuss, the author of a host of children’s books. These are now famous the world over for the magical way in which they used a repetitive vocabulary and striking images to aid reading and render it an enjoyable experience.

In this 1917 Revolution centenary year, Soviet art assumes extra prominence at this season’s Russian series.

A letter that Edward Lear wrote in 1881 to a friend to whom he intended to dispatch two drawings of Athens was among the more successful lots that Bloomsbury Auctions (24/18/12% buyer’s premium) sold on October 19.

After a two-year wait, lots from the defunct manuscript investment scheme Aristophil will be resold at the Drouot in Paris next month.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi was hammered down at $400m in Christie’s post-war and contemporary art evening sale in New York on November 15.

It’s easy to feel disconnected from the hoopla surrounding Christie’s sale last week of a Leonardo da Vinci for an astronomical $400m.

Twelve items of jewellery belonging to Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873-1938) – the woman who inspired the DH Lawrence character Lady Chatterley – contributed more than £15,000 to the sale conducted by Woolley & Wallis on October 26.

Musical manuscripts, letters and photographs of composers offered at Sotheby’s (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) on October 26 comprised the first part only of what was described as “a distinguished private collection” of books that is to be dispersed next year.