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OF the three new world auction records taken at Christie’s Rockefeller Center saleroom on the evening of November 6, two of them were for pieces of sculpture. This follows on from Christie’s success in the May Impressionist and Modern sales, their best – as Sotheby’s were for them – for some time, when Constantin Brancusi’s 1913 bronze Danaïde took $16.5m (£11.6m), the highest price for any piece of sculpture sold at auction.

Miller’s Is it Genuine? How to collect antiques with confidence General Editor John Bly, published by Miller’s. ISBN 1840006234 £19.99

SHOWING until November 23 at Gary Grant’s gallery at 18 Arlington Way, London EC1, near Sadlers Wells, is a selling exhibition Post-war patterned pots which offers 110 pieces highlighting innovative designs on mid-20th century ceramics.

David Dickinson Cheap as Chips: the Duke’s Priceless Guide to the World of Antiques video, available from November 18. £14.99; DVD version £17.99. Running time 51 mins. Momentum Pictures.

The 12th specialist textiles sale under the Rossini (17.342% buyer’s premium) hammer at Drouot on October 9 attracted keen trade interest, with 76 per cent of the 550 lots sold, yielding a hammer total of some €430,000 (£270,000).

GIVEN the fiscal disadvantages involved, Christie’s and Sotheby’s won’t usually be looking to Paris as a venue for sales of Modern art, but Christie’s (buyer’s premium 20.93%) had a modest French Collection of Post-Impressionist & Modern Paintings and Drawings on offer on September 28 that fared well enough, with 40 lots from 43 sold for a hammer total of €1.04m (£650,000) with seven per cent bought in by lot and just two per cent by value.

LONDON: DESIGNERS of today for tomorrow is how the Fine Art Society describe their annual Christmas show which will be held at their extensive galleries at 148 New Bond Street, London W1 from November 30 to December 11.

FEW would argue that Mayfair dealers Eskenazi are at the top of the international tree when it comes to dealing in Oriental art, and the November exhibitions at their Mayfair gallery are seen by a good many as the flagship selling show of the Asian Art in London celebrations.

Iron and clay in a white heat fusion as Philp brothers go Dutch with Spronken: In a new departure, London art dealer Richard Philp turns up the heat later this month and goes completely Contemporary.

In May 1919 New Yorker Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize for the first non-stop aeroplane flight from New York to Paris. In the ensuing eight years dozens of people managed to cross the Atlantic Ocean by air, but no one met Orteig’s criteria until eight years later when on May 20-21, 1927 Charles A. Lindbergh made the longest non-stop, heavier-than-air transatlantic flight in his plane, the Spirit of St Louis.

The imminent sale at Bloomsbury Book Auctions this Thursday (November 7) will feature a late 15th century French illustrated manuscript of the most important treatise on hunting of the Middle Ages, shown right. Gaston Phébus’ Livre de la Chasse and Livre de l’Ordre de Chevallerie, illuminated manuscript on paper, bound in 17th-century calf, in modern morocco-backed cloth case is estimated at £250,000-300,000.

UK: THE RICS Antiques and Fine Arts Faculty is working on a plan to develop a masters degree for graduates who hold a degree not accredited by the RICS.

Auctioneers Walker Barnett & Hill (buyer’s premium 15 per cent) were understandably celebrating their decision not to break up the contents of WTM Snape’s Tea and Coffee Merchants of Queen Street, Wolverhampton, right, when they were put up for sale on September 30.

FINE ART buyers may recoil from bloodied dead game or memento mori skulls on still lifes, but the rest of the market knows no such delicacy. Death and disaster, after a suitable lapse of time, become marketing opportunities, as was demonstrated at the Chiswick rooms of Harmers (15% buyer’s premium) on October 22 when their wide reputation as philately auctioneers brought them the remarkable Günther Heyd Disaster Mail collection from Germany.

Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons was the venue on the evening of October 29 for the sale by Thomson, Roddick and Medcalf of four important and original wallpaper designs by William Morris (1834-1896).

The fourth Frederick Parker lecture, held last week at Church House, Westminster, confirmed the potential of this event as an important annual fixture when Christopher Frayling, Rector of London’s Royal College of Art, spoke on the evolution of art and design education in Britain since the 1830s.

EC fine Sotheby’s £13m – Christie’s escape penalty: THE US courts have given the go-ahead for compensation settlements to be paid in Sotheby’s and Christie’s $512m price fixing case. The green light came last week after the 90-day appeal period set by the US Supreme Court expired with no challenge to the ruling.

Seen here are two black ink silhouettes of Teeterree and Thomas Tooi that sold for £2500 as part of the book and ephemera section of an antiques sale held on October 5 by Finan & Co. of Mere.

THE next British Antiques and Collectables Awards ceremony will be held at the Dorchester Hotel in London on June 24 next year. Unveiling details of the scheme last week, the organisers revealed a number of changes in the award categories – a process they promised to continue last year as they assessed how each category worked.

Few historic characters are guaranteed to generate more interest than the one-armed, one-eyed figure of Britain’s most celebrated admiral, Lord Nelson. Sotheby’s (19.5/10% buyer’s premium), Bond Street, 93-lot auction of Nelson memorabilia from the Alexander Davison collection sold on Trafalgar Day (October 21) to a room so packed that buyers had to spill over into an adjacent gallery.