Latest News Articles by Ian McKay
That’s the ticket – fares rise to £3200
05 December 2011DOMINIC Winter, who included the Alfred A. Charleswoth collection of old railway tickets as part of their recent collectors' and transport sale, had only a limited track record on which to rely – they sold a rare ticket for around £2000 some seven years ago.
World’s first sports broadcast comes up for sale
21 November 2011IN a world where instant electronic communication and exchange of information is available to all, two lengths of original Morse code ticker-tape seem akin to tele-antiquities.
Decoding the oldest trick in the book
27 September 2011THE largest 'Conjuring' sale seen in London for some time, at Bloomsbury Auctions on September 8, had at its core the 460-lot collection of the late Bob Read, a 'Close-Up Entertainer' and lecturer in the UK and USA who was a tireless researcher into the history of magic and conjuring.
Rare photographic record of Great Exhibition makes £180,000 at auction
20 June 2011WHEN a grand, photographically illustrated record of the Great Exhibition of 1851 was planned by the Royal Commissioners and Executive Committee, they nonetheless kept a tight grip on the exhibition purse strings.
Metastasis – a winning hand transformed
12 October 2009METASTASIS, to most people, is a word with rather grim connotations – referring as it does to the spread of cancer. Applied to a set of playing cards, however, it has an altogether different and more attractive meaning.
On the origin of bidding...
08 May 2009A YEAR that marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species has already produced several television and radio programmes on Darwin, and it was always to be expected that his saleroom profile might be high in 2009.
All at sea for the first time and earning a £52,000
18 December 2007A copy of the earliest printed sea atlas sold for a record £52,000 to a Dutch dealer in an Anderson & Garland sale of November 28.
The tale of how a man was turned into a dormouse
18 December 2006JOHN Taylor was the Sawrey joiner and wheelwright, whose wife and stout, elderly daughter, Agnes Anne, kept the village shop immortalised by Beatrix Potter in Ginger and Pickles. But the first Taylor to appear in one of her books was his son, young John, who was the model for the terrier carpenter John Joiner in The Roly Poly Pudding.