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DEALERS are, traditionally, very secretive about their restorers, whose services are probably the most vital of any to the trade, and seldom do top restorers cross over and become dealers.

EARLY bookings for Antiquaris Barcelona suggest that next year’s 29th annual staging of one of Spain’s top fairs will be markedly more international than it was earlier this year.

FIVE previously unknown photographic prints by Edgar Degas totalled €380,000 (£253,335) at Beaussant-Lefèvre (20.93/11.96% buyer’s premium) on July 2. All featured group portraits taken at the Paris home of Degas’s friend, the painter Henri Lerolle (1848-1929), and were consigned by Lerolle’s descendants.

FAIRS two weekends running at opposite ends of England make for a busy programme for the Harrogate organisers Galloway, beginning with their Naworth Castle Antiques Fair at Brampton, near Carlisle in Cumbria on August 20 to 22.

LIKE other ex-Peralta-Ramos lots that have cropped up in recent weeks, this pair of 1934 firsts of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and Claudius the God bore a red inked Chinese ownership stamp, but both were inscribed by the author in 1958, at a time when he was giving a lecture in Detroit, and they sold for $5500 (£2990) in a Sotheby’s New York sale of June 17.

FAIRS organiser Jackie Raleigh of Newbury, Berkshire has sold her company Silhouette Fairs to Andy and Sheila Briggs of Oxfordshire-based Fat Cat Fairs.

One of the most mysterious objects in Bonhams’ Made in Scotland sale from August 18-20, was a fascinating 18th century anamorphic painting – one of a whole class of pictures that required cylindrical mirrors to view the true image.