International

The diverse collection of Jeffrey M Kaplan is making various appearances under the hammer this spring.

Past playthings by a host of famous vintage toy manufacturers will feature in the next Signature sale of Toys and Trains held by the specialist auction house Bertoia in Vineland, New Jersey, on March 25.

The legal impasse surrounding the restitution of thousands of historical documents and manuscripts from the scandal-hit Aristophil investment scheme was finally broken last week.

Since its launch in 2002 the TEFAF Art Market Report has established itself as the art and antiques trade’s key annual barometer of size and trends.

Typewriters on which famous books came into existence have featured on these pages before, but not for some time – and certainly not machines of a kind that that continue to be used by their owner to this day.

The Pittsfield, Massachusetts, auction house Fontaine’s has a track record of selling good examples of horology and has achieved some very high prices recently for elaborate English clocks made for the Chinese market.

A select sale of just 31 lots of Asian art assembled by a Japanese collector and his sons raised a recordbreaking $262.8m (£215.5m) at Christie’s New York on March 15. It made more in a single evening than any New York Asian sale series.

It is not often that market economists agree, and so it goes with the TEFAF Art Market Report’s current and previous authors. Economics is, after all, not an exact science and analysing a market as opaque as art and antiques is certainly problematic.

Munich coin fair raided by 30 police as Nagel moves Asian sale to Austria

This large, 6ft (1.8m) diameter circular oil on canvas, 'April' is the work of the Nabis painter Maurice Denis. It is one of three ceiling panels commissioned from the artist by the musician Ernest Chausson for his Parisian town house between 1894 and 1899.

Possibly the first printed reference to a ‘Great White’ shark attack is found in a four-page pamphlet, printed in Naples in 1721, from which the woodcut shown here is taken.

Following a deal between the German state and specialist manuscripts dealer Les Enluminures, this 10th century illuminated Gospels created at Liesborn Abbey will return to Westphalia.

A Chinese Kangxi period triple gourd vase that once belonged to the financier JP Morgan will feature as one of the highlights in Heritage Auctions’ inaugural Asian Art sale in Dallas on April 2.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning lots fall flat... but annotated Dorian Gray leaves treble the estimate

With BBC Radio 4 currently offering a season of programmes focusing on the Red Planet in fact and fiction, a couple of books from the Edgar Rice Burroughs series of Martian fantasies that made high prices in a recent US sale are an appropriate choice for these reports.