International

Twenty-seven looted artefacts seized from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art have been returned to Italy and Egypt as part of longrunning investigations by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit.

'Sky, Mountain, Forest,' a 1963 painting by Korean artist Ree Bong Sang (1916-70) was among the sales at the Frieze Masters section of the inaugural Frieze Seoul.

The principal portion of a two-part sale conducted by Sotheby’s New York included not one, but three lots that brought seven-figure bids.

Sold online for a record $20,000 (£16,340) at the former Butterfields, now Bonhams Los Angeles (27.5/26/20/14.5% buyer’s premium) salerooms as part of the David Lloyd collection of modern literature was a 1909 first edition of Frank L Baum’s 'The Road to Oz'.

Sold at Bonhams Skinner (27.5/26/20/14.5% buyer’s premium) was a 1584 first edition of Reginald Scot’s 'The Discoverie of Witchcraft….'

The October 13 sale of Early Printed Books at Swann Auction Galleries in New York will feature part two of the library of Ken Rapoport: English literature, tales of chivalry from the Renaissance, and more Shakespeare, Chaucer, Cervantes, Donne, and others.

Freeman’s September 21 Books and Manuscripts auction, in Pennsylvania is led by an ‘extremely rare’ first edition of 'New Englands First Fruits' (estimate $20,000-30,000), a 1643 account of Puritan evangelisation in New England.

Sold at $440,000 (£371,000), the most expensive lot in a three-day auction at Heritage (25% buyer’s premium) was a logbook kept on the B29 Superfortress bomber that dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945.

The Books & Autographs auction at Koller in Zurich on September 21 features the greatest work by artist and naturalist Maria Sybilla Merian on the insects and fauna of Surinam, estimated at SwFr120,000-160,000.

Away from London, some exceptional coin sales coming up in Europe include a number of outstanding British issues.

'Hortus sanitatis' (Gart der Gesundheit, Augsburg 1485), considered among the most important early works of natural history and one of the first scientific incunabula in a vernacular language, is on offer at Munich saleroom Ketterer Kunst on November 28.

A well-preserved and boxed version of the 1960s Japanese Masudaya Machine Man robot was the highest flyer in the Morphy Auctions (20% buyer’s premium) August 9-10 toys and collectables sale in Denver, Pennsylvania.

Bertoia’s sale of the collection of Bill and Stevie Weart will be held over two days in Vineland, New Jersey, on September 8-9.

Doyle in New York is holding a Fine Art auction on September 14 offering a selection of affordable paintings, prints and sculpture that spans the late 19th through the 20th centuries.

A single-owner sale of property from a Parisian collection will be on offer at Artcurial in Paris on September 21.

'Une histoire du temps' (a history of time) is the title of the sale to be held by Aguttes in Neuilly on September 28.

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art is staging a pop-up exhibition from September 13-October 7 of drawings by Adolph Menzel in Hamburg after an earlier staging was cut short by Covid restrictions.

Massachusetts sale includes elaborate examples of early needlework from across the Atlantic