UK

Running to 50 volumes in all, the official report on 'The Scientific Results of the Voyage of HMS Challenger during the years 1873-76 in Atlantic, Pacific and Antarctic seas' took some 23 years to complete.

Throughout May, Antiques On High in Oxford will have a window display to support a new book by local author and ex-dealer Sylvia Vetta.

In an age of cumbersome large photographical apparatus, the race was on in the mid-19th century to produce practical small, easily portable cameras.

In terms of name recognition in the UK, Alvar Aalto is probably outranked by the American couple Charles Eames (1907-78) and his wife Ray (1912-88). Of their output the lounge chair (670) and ottoman (671) designed in 1956 is the most iconic.

Now a regular fixture for a number of auction houses, specialist Modern Design sales have moved a long way since the days when the title could mean mountains of Moorcroft and Clarice Cliff and not a lot more.

Devoted wholly to modern firsts, a recent online sale presented the first selection of a single-owner collection – the second portion of which will be sold later in the year.

An incomplete set of that remarkable ornithological work, William Lewin’s 'Birds of Great Britain', was the most expensive lot in a recent Yorkshire sale.

Special Auction Services regularly holds sales of photographic equipment cameras and photographs in its Newbury rooms.

Photographica 2019 is a destination for collectors of classic cameras. The fair hosts up to 135 tables for buying, selling and swapping classic and antique cameras from across the country.

The ‘Big Red’ Daytona reference 6265 is one of the most desirable Rolex chronographs from the 1980s.

With a documented provenance and inscribed by the maker Sébastien Garnier, Paris, 1747, a two-manual harpsichord was the top performer at the latest musical instruments sale held by Corsham, Bath, specialist Gardiner Houlgate (20% buyer’s premium).

Flemish Old Masters and Modern works combined to boost takings at two spring sales held north and south in England.

Universal Genève helped change the horological landscape in 1934 with the introduction of an affordable two-button Compur chronograph – a line that continued into the 1940s.

Lyon & Turnbull’s (25% buyer’s premium) inaugural Modern Made auction at the Mall Galleries in London received plenty of encouraging noises from the dealing and collecting community as it posted a total of £1m (including premium).

A significant collection of pictures by the Victorian watercolourist Albert Goodwin (1845-1932) was a near sell-out at auction in Suffolk and generated just under £120,000.

More homely than the material being produced in Scandinavia and France, the adzed oak furniture first made by Robert ‘Mouseman’ Thompson in the 1920s-30s was, nevertheless, a distinctive genre.

Based in one of the great centres of English glass, Fieldings (20% buyer’s premium) of Stourbridge has been building its reputation for glass sales over the past 15 years and today “nobody sells more glass than we do”, says specialist Will Farmer.

After abandoning his early career as a contributor to Punch and the Illustrated London News, Myles Birket Foster (1825-99) went on to establish his reputation as a painter of technically skilled and highly polished watercolours, depicting landscapes and rustic subjects from Scotland to the Mediterranean.

With his father-in-law David Benden, Andrew Bott runs five annual busy antiques and vintage fairs at the town hall in Clare, Suffolk, which also has a number of antiques shops and galleries.

Belinda and Tom Kilduff (pictured below) are Lincolnshire locals and Antiques & Home Show loyalists. They noted how “busy, condensed and lively” the one-day format was.