Collectables

...but it's still bad for you US: HOT news from health-conscious America. After years of campaigning from pro-winers, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has agreed to allow the words DO CONSULT YOUR DOCTOR ABOUT THE BENEFICIAL EFFECTS OF DRINKING WINE to be added to the back label, as well as the statutory health warning. So now it’s official. Not only is wine bad for you, but it’s good for you as well.

UK: FOR the moment at least the great international wine auctioneering machine grinds on serenely enough with lottage selling rates routinely at levels of 90 per cent or better.

UK: PRINCIPAL FOCUS of attention at this auction was the range of private press, limited edition and other modern illustrated books on offer.

UK: THE Christie’s South Kensington sale of March 19 fielded no fewer than three copies of the book that was the main source of western knowledge of Japan in the 18th century, the two-volume History of Japan... written by Englebert Kaempfer.

Sales in Switzerland A SCARCE first edition, in a ‘curious’ binding, of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine which proved a surprise star turn of a Galerie Koller auction held in Zurich on February 8, selling for a premium inclusive SFr51,168 (£22,745), was illustrated and described in an earlier issue of the Antiques Trade Gazette, but illustrated and described here are a few more of the highlights.

Georgian grandeur helps break the £1m barrier UK: THE reign of George III is a popular collecting theme and so it is worthwhile reporting on Spink’s (10 per cent buyer’s premium) specialist sale of the Herman Selig collection on March 2.

UK: A contemporary reviewer described a multi-volume study of The American Woods by Romeyn Beck Hough as “one of the most marvellous and instructive books ever made”, but this accolade seems something of an understatement when one considers that this work and a spin-off (or should that be sawn-off) companion work on ...Commercial Woods were illustrated with actual specimens of over 300 species!

The Ultimate Corkscrew Book by Donald A Bull

UK: DESPITE the irritation of losing contact with a US telephone bidder on the way, the auctioneers managed to secure a bid of £3500 from Arden on the principal colour plate lot in the sale – a six volume, second series set of J-J.Linden’s Iconographie des Orchidées of 1895-1900, presenting 273 chromolitho plates.

Musical Instruments UK: NO fewer than four sales of musical instruments took place in London between March 15 and 17: at Phillips, Sotheby’s, Bonhams and Christie’s South Kensington (all 15/10 per cent buyer’s premium). Over 1000 lots went under the hammer in all with over £2.3m netted between the four rooms.

UK: “THE saving grace of the whisky bottle market,” said Alan Blakeman who runs bottle specialists BBR (buyer’s premium 10 per cent) , “is that as soon as the Australians, with their currency problems, started to disappear from the scene, the Americans started to show an interest.”

UK: TOP LOT in this sale was a 1668 edition of Gervase Markham’s A Way to get Wealth, a ‘nonce’ collection, first issued in 1623, which incorporates half a dozen works by this important but prolific and commercially inventive writer on agriculture, who was not averse to putting different titles to what were essentially the same works or to re-issuing unsold copies of new books under new titles.

US: A ‘FINE & RARE’ sale held by Pacific Book Auctions on February 25 saw strong bidding for botanical plate collections, with a very rare first edition of Description des plantes nouvelles et peu connues, cultivés dans le jardin de J.M.Cels selling at $22,500 (£13,390).

- Raymond Chandler on the English US: IN MY LAST American round-up, I reported on the sale at Swanns of an early printing of the Treaty of Paris that had been owned by the Reverend Samuel Cooper of Boston, a now largely forgotten but once key political and spiritual figure in the War of Independence.