Auctions

Coming fresh to market from a corn merchant’s shop, seven early/mid- 20th century enamel signs extolling Spratt’s pet food for dogs, cats and canaries attracted UK collectors to Bishop & Miller’s (20% buyer’s premium) Stowmarket sale on May 17.

The hope at every house clearance came true for Reading auctioneer Chris Boreham when he unearthed this set of four Georgian silver rococo candlesticks at a local home.

Headline stratospheric results should not put collectors off, as a London auction underlines.

Pamphlet in later royal binding offers thanksgiving for James I’s survival of Gunpowder Plot.

Three potential highlights from German auctions at Van Ham in Cologne, Quittenbaum in Munich and Wendl in Rudolstadt.

Part of the flying section of the most recent of the Military, Aviation & Transport History sales that are a regular feature of the calendar at Dominic Winter offered a collection of ephemera related to the earlier years of European civil aviation.

Five oil paintings by the German artist Gabriele Münter, long-time companion and partner of Wassily Kandinsky, were very much at the centre of the action on May 8 in Stuttgart when Nagel (33% buyer’s premium) sold Modern and Contemporary art.

An example of the first commercially produced typewriter – one of only five in private hands – has sold for €100,000 at auction in Germany.

Bonhams will offer the most valuable English Golden Age clock ever to appear at auction as part of next month’s sale of the Clive collection.

A painting by the celebrated Chinese 20th century artist Zhang Da Qian (1899-1983) sold for £2.3m (plus premium) at Woolley & Wallis.

In the Late Middle Ages the chaplet, made in many materials from boxwood to precious metals, was a commonplace aid to keep count of the repetition of prayers or the chapters read in a Book of Hours.

Unusually for an Asian art sale, the top price at Sworders' latest offering in in Stansted Mountfitchet was paid for a Japanese work of art.