Print Edition

Catalogued together with an incomplete silver propelling pencil with a bloodstone terminal, a silver Art Deco pocket lighter with a timepiece sold at £5200 (estimate £100-200) at Amersham Auction Rooms (17.5% buyer’s premium) on July 11.

The words ‘country’ and ‘brocante’ have an allure of their own as Lucy Haywood discovered when she founded the Country Brocante store in the village of Midhurst, West Sussex.

MADAM – Now the journalistic ‘silly season’ is with us and you have recently curtailed discussion about ‘ordinaries’ and ‘longcases’ (I thought this could tick on for longer, having my own now unpublished theories) may I introduce other subjects to fill the void.

One notable consequence of the growing prevalence of charity shops on the high street is that auctioneers are receiving more and more items that these organisations want to check in case they are valuable.

An antiques dealer in the picturesque market town of Bridgnorth in Shropshire is retiring from the trade to concentrate on her writing career.

A fine Victorian building in the town of Cockermouth in the Lake District which was built in 1868 for the founder of Mitchell’s Auctions – whose saleroom is still in the town – is now home to the Fairfield House Antiques Centre.

MADAM – I would be grateful if any of your experts or readers could help me with identifying an instrument (pictured below) brought to me by one of my customers.

The huge variety of exotic arms brought back to Europe from the East during colonial days is becoming an increasingly lucrative area of business for auction houses.

The collecting of English military swords is a science in itself.

In the days of the British Raj there was no shortage of would-be shikaris hoping to bag a tiger in India. At the same time plenty of London gunsmiths were ready to supply them with all the fire-power they could persuade them to buy.

Jerrard Nares of Mytton Antiques deals in 18th and 19th century furniture and related decorative small items from his shop in Shrewsbury.

A 19th century Russian shashka sword with fine niello-worked ornament sold for £6700 against an estimate of £250-450 at Amersham Auction Rooms (17.5% buyer’s premium) on August 1.

On Friday, August 8, Michael Bloomstein of Brighton was paying the following for bulk scrap against a gold fix of: $1503.50 / €1345.66 / £1242.19

Somerset auction shows how bidders are very sensitive to how works are estimated.

Landscape painter Sidney Richard Percy (1821-86) is described in Christopher Wood’s Dictionary of Victorian Painters as “a prolific and variable painter, and his prices vary accordingly”.

The traditionally quiet month of August means that fairs and exhibitions are thin on the ground while some dealers take a few well-earned weeks off.

The 102nd staging of the London Antique Arms Fair is on Saturday, August 24.

The personal enthusiasm of John Braund of Turpin’s Antiques, who died in January aged 90, was early oak and associated metalware.

A 19th century plaster bust of Napoleon was among sales at the recent Cotswold Decorative Antiques & Art Fair, which takes place in Westonbirt School near Tetbury three times a year.

This c.1960s Japanese Robot Rocket Ship made by Modern Toys (Masudaya) will feature in the two-day Basics summer auction to be held by Bertoia on August 22-23.