Features

The collecting market for dolls’ house furniture has been enjoying a boom period if recent prices have been anything to go by.

The British Toy Auctions (18% buyer’s premium) sale on January 8 in Runcorn included several Pelham Puppets rarities.

It was not uncommon in the 18th century for a doll to be presented within its own miniature doll-scaled world.

Auction house H&H Classics (15% buyer’s premium) is best known for selling full-sized vehicles but a smaller model impressed in a recent automobilia sale.

A Dinky Supertoys 935 Leyland Octopus flat truck with chains in its original box sold for £8200 at Kent saleroom C&T (22% buyer’s premium) on January 14.

The strong level of prices being paid by collectors for dolls’ house furniture was underlined at a recent C&T sale.

How did toy manufacturers get boys in the rather less PC 1960s to play with dolls?

This Volvo PV 444 diecast toy is by the Swedish toy distributor Gösta Norén.

The cow catcher and bell on this Gauge 1 clockwork loco gives the game away: although made by German firm Märklin, the set was for the American market.

Furnished dolls’ houses and accessories in general are proving the most dynamic area of the collecting market

Traditional picturesque views of Scotland show signs of a market revival

A selection of period and vintage jewellery lots for sale in January, February and March.

Covid-19 has played havoc with the jewellery fairs and auction calendar but it has done little to dull the appetite for quality antique and vintage pieces.

A recent sale at Franklin Browns (18% buyer’s premium) in Edinburgh on included one of the most ambitious and most desirable of all early 19th century Staffordshire figure groups: the 'Polito’s Menagerie of the wonderful burds and beasts from most parts of the world'.

When the Bolshevik government took control of the Imperial Porcelain Factory following the October Revolution of 1917, large quantities of glazed but unpainted white hard-paste porcelain plates, cups and saucers remained at the site.

Bonhams has a long tradition of single-owner sales devoted to noted collections of early English porcelain.

The rules of kriegsspiel (war game), popular at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, were partly based on the much older game of chess. Typically, kriegsspiel was played across three boards, with players only knowing the position of their own pieces and an umpire officiating.

A collection of English pottery offered by Adam Partridge (20% buyer’s premium) in Macclesfield included this early 19th century copper lustre and transfer printed ‘anti-slavery’ mug.

The Welsh Sale at Rogers Jones (22% buyer’s premium) in Cardiff included a large section of Welsh ceramics from a west Wales estate.

A London auction offering ceramics fans a treat thanks to single-owner collections and a mixed array leads a look at the market as a whole