UK

CHRISTIE'S South Kensington are to launch a new sales programme next year that will turn them into a seven-days-a-week operation.

PROVINICIAL auctioneers may no longer be able to bank on a solid furniture take-up to keep business ticking over (the 162-lot furniture section at Bruton Knowles (15% buyer's premium) on September 16 fielded the lion’s share of casualties), but at least they can rely on unusual, commercial or quality entries still selling at a premium.

THE National Maritime Museum has purchased two prints from a London dealer following its appeal in the Antiques Trade Gazette for information about two missing William Hodges paintings.

THE focus of the furniture trade’s attention in Bamfords' (15% buyer's premium) 1025-lot Derbyshire outing on September 8 was a c.1835 mahogany, triple-pedestal dining table with a top formed from two D-sections and a central Pembroke drop leaf.

THE sale of a Shakespeare First Folio is a rare event, but the sale of a copy that emerged out of nowhere is something that comes around only once in a generation.

GRAHAM Smith of Graham Smith Antiques in Jesmond, Newcastle has joined LAPADA’s board of directors. He started his own business in 1999 after 27 years working with Owen Humble Antiques.

THIS unusual metamorphic George III mahogany dressing table, right, goes under the Charterhouse gavel on Friday October 15.

SOME provincial auctioneers batten down the hatches during August, but for Keys (10% buyer's premium) in Norfolk it was a particularly busy month with two antique sales, a collectors’ auction and a picture outing.

AS is often the case at regular provincial auctions these days, proceedings at Abbotts Auction Rooms' (12% buyer's premium) otherwise fairly routine, 438-lot September 8 sale were enlivened by a couple of novel entries.

DISPERSING 200 mixed-quality clocks may seem a daunting prospect for some provincial auctioneers, but, by selling the Staffordshire collection in bite-size chunks through their general, oak and country and fine auctions, Richard Winterton (15% buyer's premium) managed to get away almost all entries during the summer months.

When it comes to pulling in buyers, the country house sale held on the premises is a hard format hard to beat – unless, of course, you can combine the attraction with a titled provenance.

WITHERS and Devonshires Solicitors, law firms who specialise in art market issues, are sponsoring two seminars: one on art loans and the risks involved, the other on art and the police.

THERE is still a chance to book tickets for the RICS conference in Leeds from October 15-17.

“EVERY auction house’s dream” is how Rupert Powell, managing director of Bloomsbury Auctions, described the discovery of a Shakespeare First Folio that will provide a fitting centrepiece for the company’s 500th sale on Thursday October 7.

FOLLOWING the Antiques Trade Gazette’s coverage of the sale of a micromosaic table signed by Michelangelo Barberi for £250,000 at Dreweatt Neate’s Donnington Priory rooms in January – still the highest price achieved for an item of furniture in a UK saleroom so far this year – the Newbury firm received a call from a gentleman in Scotland.

FROM February 2005, the Newark International Antiques and Collectors Fair, the largest event of its kind in Europe, will become a three-day event, starting on Thursday and finishing on Saturday.

NOW an autumn institution in Kensington, two of the London borough’s top ceramics specialists hold their concurrent annual selling exhibitions from October 5 to 16. Both have something to celebrate.

A NEW auction house will open for business next week in North Wales. Aqueduct Auctions, named due to its location which is near the famous Thomas Telford Poncyllte Aqueduct, will operate from the Bryn Seion chapel on Station Road in Trevor, near Llangollen.

IT was a third edition of 1799, slightly foxed and browned and lacking the half titles, but the copy of George Walker’s novel The Vagabond seen in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of August 19 was in a contemporary calf gilt binding and it sold at £400 (C.R. Johnson).

FOR the third year running, Harrogate-based Galloway Antiques Fairs hold their Gosforth Park Antiques Fair at Brandling House, Newcastle upon Tyne.