UK

Although Charles Dickens is often credited with creating the ‘modern’ Christmas, some of the recognition should go to John Leech.

Containing numerous diagrams, a manuscript manual on 18th century shipbuilding techniques and practices sold for £3600 in a recent sale.

Nick Bayliss of Continuity Fairs is launching a new biannual antiques, home and vintage fair at Bath Racecourse, the UK’s highest flat racecourse.

Extinct for 65 million years, dinosaurs continue to rule the world of children visiting the National History Museum, of multi-million dollar movie makers – and of bidders at the Evolution Sales at Summers Place Auctions (25% buyer’s premium).

“Try a glass of Old Bushmills whiskey, your majesty, it is the whiskey all connoisseurs drink”. Not only that, but it seems this royally promoted tipple was “… recommended by Doctors in cases of Gout and Rheumatism as the most helpful drink”.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

Collectors who missed out on a rare late 19th century cabin trunk at auction last week have the chance to buy another in West Sussex this coming Friday.

Included among more than 70 paintings and prints offered at Dorset saleroom Clarke’s Auctions (18% buyer’s premium) was this uncharacteristic Joseph Farquharson (1846-1935) oil of the artist’s garden in Aberdeenshire.

This rare sampler, just 6in (15cm) across, was completed by a girl from the Queens Orphan School in Van Diemen’s Land (the island of Tasmania) in 1838.

Exuding the exuberant confidence of pre-1914 Britain, this 21in (52cm) long silver table centrepiece, below, was a natural target for the London trade at the Anthemion (17.5% buyer’s premium) November 20 sale in Cardiff.

When this portrait of a young woman was first exhibited in the early 1930s, critics remarked on its “intensity and vital quality”, “the charming head” and the “wonderful life-like expression”.

As with so many other businesses, art and antiques dealerships go into overdrive for the intense selling period up to Christmas. Here is a selection of five items from exhibitions and the latest catalogues.

Losses narrowed for stamps, coins and medals business Stanley Gibbons in the six months to September 30.

Personal devotional prayer books, known as a Book of Hours, were popular among the wealthy and powerful in late medieval Europe. Illuminated with miniature paintings depicting the life of Christ, the Virgin Mary and saints, they were sometimes personalised for the patrons who commissioned them.

One of the rarest pieces in Suffolk House Antiques’ Christmas selling exhibition is a Georgian candle stand in fruitwood and elm. The back would have protected the flame so that the person using it would have uninterrupted light even in a draughty house. Examples bearing the original backs do not always show up intact.

IACF has announced a change to the three-day antiques and collectors’ fairs held in Shepton Mallet at the Royal Bath and West Showground five times a year.

Invented in the 19th century but outmoded by word processors then computers, typewriters are now having a resurgence in the collecting world.

The height of fashion nearly three centuries ago, this 18th century doll’s dress caught the eye at C&T’s (20% buyer’s premium) specialist sale in Tunbridge Wells.

Two November sales underlined the current strength of the field of British studio pottery.

Specialist Philip Smith, head of the 20th Century & Modern British Art departments at the London outlet of Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull (25% buyer’s premium), believes studio ceramics should be classed as art.