London

This silver half crown proof from 1839 sold for £6000 at London Coin Auctions (20% buyer’s premium).

Sovereign Rarities (20% buyer’s premium) conducted its second joint auction with The Royal Mint in the second half of last year.

This rare Umayyad gold dinar dated 105AH (723AD) equalled the auction record for an Islamic coin (or any coin sold in Europe) when it was hammered down at £3.1m at Morton & Eden (20% buyer’s premium).

This bronze Albert Medal, awarded to Lieutenant John Edward Gibbons (1905-71) for saving life at sea, sold for £8000 (plus 20% buyer’s premium) at Bonhams Knightsbridge.

This acrylic on canvas, 8 Duncan Terrace (1977), by artist Graham Dean is on offer at Darnley Fine Art.

A clever piece of marketing from the oil company Shell and with slightly saucy automobile-referenced lines, this Valentine dates from a tradition of sending cards to Shell’s female customers who had accounts at their garages. This ran from 1938-75, apart from an interruption during the war years.

Willem Janszoon Blaeu is one of the more famous names in the history of map and globe making and at Christie’s (25/20/13.5/% buyer’s premium), the tiny pocket globe attributed to him shown here was sold for a treble-estimate £230,000.

For a man who has built his career around teddy bears it is a strange quirk of fate that these inoffensive toys make him feel unwell.

In ATG No 2427 we noted the sale at Sotheby’s on December 10, at a very much higher than expected £50,000, of a rare copy of the 1553 translation into ‘Scots English’ of Virgil’s Aeneid by Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld.

Extraordinarily high prices paid for the works of the Russian writer Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev were noted in ATG No 2425, and there were many more lots of interest in the sale held by Christie’s (25/20/13.5% buyer’s premium) in which they were offered.

Populated with grotesque figures, this 16th century engraving after the early Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450-1516) sold for £16,000 at auction in London.

Nineteen years after launching the annual 'Peaks and Glaciers' exhibition, dealer William Mitchell reflects that as the snow on the peaks themselves has contracted, so too has the supply of topographical Alpine scenes.

‘Masterpieces’ from the celebrated collections of Dr Martin Schøyen offered at a recent Christie’s (25/20/13.5% buyer’s premium) sale in London included some real rarities.

The arms fair held in the Pillar Hall in Olympia is moving to another venue in west London which provides greater space.