News

NOT everyone sleeps it off on Boxing Day. Lancashire organisers Hoyle Promotions have been organising a Giant Boxing Day Fair at the Empress Ballroom at Blackpool Winter Gardens for more than 20 years and both public and trade attendance grows from year to year.

NOW in its fourth year The Original London Textiles,Vintage Fashion and Accessories Fair continues to make its mark attracting a different crowd to most fairs, many of them from the fashion industry.

A small selection of striking and dramatic bookbindings by Philip Smith offered at Sotheby’s as part of their July 10 English Literature & History sale was not a complete success. In fact, five of the six lots failed to sell, but the most important of them, catalogued as “the greatest and most celebrated postwar English bookbinding” brought a bid of £130,000 from a collector.

HONG KONG ASIAN SALES : When SARS broke out in Asia earlier this year, Sotheby’s decided to hold their Asian auction series in Hong Kong as planned in April, but Christie’s postponed their Hong Kong sales until early July. Sotheby’s may not have registered the same levels of Western interest in their two fine Chinese sales on April 27 (the combined 281 lots totalled a premium-inclusive HK$106,481,440), but like Christie’s, they reported increased mainland Chinese buying.

ONE can never accuse the energetic Essex organiser Robert Bailey of resting on his laurels, or even standing still for longer than it takes to greet a visitor to one of his fairs. More aware than most independent organisers of the increasing importance of marketing Robert has just appointed Zöe Martin (right) to his permanant staff to oversee marketing and public relations.

A successful sale isn’t always an instant transaction and one of the more notable features of exhibiting at a fair is follow-on business. This can often take some time to materialise but is nonetheless satisfying, especially when it produces a particularly pleasing conclusion, as was the case with this pair of 18th century Sèvres vases à compartiments, pictured right, which London dealer Robert Compton-Jones of the Woollahra Trading Co. took to the Paris Biennale last September.

Decorator’s home supplies the demands of today now good looks outrank authentic age: WITH a hammer total of well over £1 million and a 98 per cent selling rate, the on-the-premises contents sale at Wormington Manor, Worcestershire, notched up the sort of figures in the grand tradition of such Sotheby’s events, but in fact it was in many ways much more representative of current trends than past glories.