UK

IN an unfinished craft binding of crushed red morocco with full doublures, the lower cover with borders of inlaid blue and gilt pointillé cornerpiece, a paper copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer of 1896 was sold for £17,000 to an American dealer in a May 6 sale held by Bonhams.

BOUND in half calf gilt and marbled boards, the three-vol., 1813 second edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that sold for £4600 in a May 21 sale held by John Bellman of Billingshurst bore the pencil initials H.D. for Horace Darwin (Charles Darwin’s son) and his bookplates were to be found in a copy of the 1818, four-vol. first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in a similar but less well-preserved binding that sold at £2500.

THE estimates were rather modest, but prices paid for some of the Biggles books offered as part of a May 21 sale held by Keys of Aylsham bode well for the Biggles collection that Dominic Winter are to sell on June 24. In Aylsham, Hamilton copies of The Black Peril of c.1936, in soiled blue cloth, and The Cruise of the Condor, an undated Ace series title with adverts for Spring 1937, were valued at around £40 apiece but sold for £1050 and £480 respectively.

CAMBRIDGESHIRE dealers Simon and Penny Rumble generally deal with the trade and by appointment only from Causeway End Farmhouse, Chittering, but they have just converted a barn into a new showroom and celebrate from June 17 to 20 with a selling exhibition to which everyone is welcome.

AN undated medical volume offered as part of a May 8 antiques sale held by Fieldings of Stourbridge brought a bid of £430.

MANY were as intrigued as myself at Caroline Penman’s Tythe Barn Experience which took place from May 21 to 23.

Comprising 60 oban panels that form 20 triptychs, a concertina form, Senso-e album of c.1895 that sold for £3200 as part of a May 27 sale of original drawings and watercolours, prints and maps held by Bloomsbury Auctions is a record of events of the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 in which Japan’s modernised armed forces gained a swift and comparatively easy victory over the much larger Chinese forces.

THE jacket was torn with loss and four of the five paintbox pictures had been partly coloured, but a copy of The New Adventures of Rupert, the 1936, first Rupert annual, was sold at £580 in a May 13 sale held by Greenslade Taylor Hunt.

FOR a summer boost to their Somerset showground fixture, DMG Antiques Fairs are introducing outside pitches to the Shepton Mallet Antiques & Collectors Fair to be held over the weekend of July 9 to 11.

VETERAN fair organiser Reg Cooper is back – official. In early 2002 he sold his Cooper Antiques Fair circuit to Sue Ede, and for a while he remained at those fairs, helping out and exhibiting. But he has been gone for a while and recently rumours abounded that he was planning a comeback.

AT the tail-end of a 500-lot sale of Russian pictures and other works of art held by Sotheby’s on May 26 was a small selection of photograph albums and books, two of which are illustrated and briefly described here.

EAST Anglian early furniture specialist Andrew Singleton has, for many years, held a popular pre-Christmas selling exhibition at his shop, Suffolk House Antiques, in Yoxford High Street, and following the consistent success of these shows he is staging a summer version, opening on June 12 and running for a week.

A MAY 11 sale held by Sotheby’s Olympia to dispose of property from the collections of the late Lord and Lady Menuhin included a collection of material by and about the American writer Willa Cather, who was a great friend of Marutha Menuhin, Yehudi’s mother, and a close friend to all the Menuhin children. She also wrote many letters to Marutha, but all of these were burned after her death, in accordance with the writer’s will.

HERE is some information about one of the unqualified recent successes of the London ceramics scene, Eight Days in June, a concurrent series of exhibitions held by four leading Kensington dealers from June 7 to 15.

THIS punting scene by Whistler is one of some 3000 additional original and reproduction etchings and engravings, mostly full-page and many mounted and titled in ink as well as being mounted, where possible opposite the relevant text, that were to be found in an extra-illustrated 1880, third edition of Philip G. Hamerton’s Etchings & Etchers seen at Bonhams on May 6.

IT was in the summer of 2000 that Fran Foster of Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre took her Antiques For Everyone formula to Glasgow in an attempt to establish a large, good quality, vetted Scottish fair, a feat which previous organisers had failed to achieve.

IN a general sale held by Bloomsbury Auctions on May 13, a copy of J.M. Richards’ High Street of 1938 that was signed on the front free endpaper by W.J. Bassett-Lowke, the proprietor of one of the shops illustrated in the work’s coloured litho illustrations by Eric Ravilious, was sold for £1150.

THERE is nothing like a modestly estimated, old English collection of Chinese art to lure London’s specialist trade to the provinces.

The highlight of the sale conducted by Mallams of Bocardo House, Oxford on May 26 was this rare mahogany Windsor chair (shown right) consigned for sale from a deceased estate in the Cherwell Valley of North Oxfordshire.

THE catalogue at Hampton and Littlewood’s (15% buyer's premium) April 28-29 sale may have been a model of its kind but even Homer nods… and Mr Hampton did so while “late-night cataloguing” this sentimental little group, right.