Thomson Roddick & Medcalf

A small collection of railwayana from the estate of the late Stephen Crook, a Carlisle-based collector and railway photographer, will be included at Thomson, Roddick & Medcalf’s sale on August 2 in Carlisle.

Outhwaite & Litherland have sold their Liverpool saleroom but retain their house clearance team.

Pick up a copy of a Beswick price guide from the late 1990s and it will tell you that the Galloway Bull, designed by Arthur Gredington, was made in three versions.

ISAAC ROSENBERG had produced just two small pamphlet collections of verse and a play before he was killed in action on April Fool’s Day, 1918, but his reputation is now established as one of the finer war poets.

ALTHOUGH the 616-lot sale held by Thomson, Roddick & Medcalf (15% buyer’s premium) in Edinburgh took place back on June 23, the sale highlight merits recording. This was the finely worked silver gilt globe cup, right, probably made in Germany.

TWO BOX files of Ford manufacturers’ catalogues, advertising material and other ephemera of 1920s and ’30s motoring interest brought a bid of £1550 in a May 19 sale held by Thomson Roddick & Medcalf and the only other lot to reach four figures was a collection of some 370 postcards relating almost entirely to Ulverston and Furness.

OFFERED at Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons, a 169-lot section of Scottish provincial silver provided many of the highlights at Thomson Roddick & Medcalf’s (15% buyer's premium) March 29 sale.

RONALD W. Coleby of Houghton in Cumbria, who died last year, just a week after completing the memoir of his wife that had occupied much of his time in recent years, became a full-time bookseller in 1972, specialising in hunting, shooting and, above all, fishing.

IN these days of global marketing and online bidding it is reassuring to know that, just occasionally, with some wit and a little good fortune, one can still make a good wage from a solitary find at the local auction room.

THIS Saturday (May 1) Thomson Roddick & Medcalf will be selling the entire stock-in-trade of Edinburgh restorer and cabinetmaker William Trist at its Esbank saleroom.

EDINBURGH auctioneers Thomson, Roddick & Medcalf (15% buyer’s premium) dispersed 532 lots at their Edinburgh saleroom on March 15 and auctioneer Sybelle Medcalf felt the market held up pretty well considering the international climate.

ONE of the more expensive lots in this Cumbrian sale at Thomson Roddick & Medcalf on 6 November was an 1881 [Philadelphia] limited edition of the Complete Poems and Prose of Walt Whitman. An ex-library copy in well worn cloth and bearing a typescript note that it was bought “...at the sale of the library of the late Lord Rosebery”, it made £920. Some copies are signed, but the catalogue referred only to a manuscript limitation statement.

Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons was the venue on the evening of October 29 for the sale by Thomson, Roddick and Medcalf of four important and original wallpaper designs by William Morris (1834-1896).

THE private collection of the late Lake District hoteliers Brian Sack and Francis Coulston provided some choice pickings for collectors with a decorative bent but a limited budget at Thomson, Roddick and Medalf on 9 July.

In today’s liberal society only the more prudish of eyes would blink at the notion of two women living together but back in 1778, when the notorious ‘Ladies of Llangollen’ eloped to Wales dressed as men, it was nothing short of scandalous.

Buying art as an investment has always been a perilous business. Back in the 1920s during the so-called Etching Boom speculating collectors were prepared to pay hundreds of pounds – ie more than the price of an average London house – for single prints by ultra- fashionable artists such as Muirhead Bone, David Young Cameron and James McBey.

Robert Somervell’s A Protest against the Extension of Railways in the Lake District, published in Windermere in 1876, contains “articles thereon reprinted from the Saturday Review etc.”, and a nine page preface by one of those who objected to the intrusion of the railways into the Lake District – John Ruskin.

ONE of the top lots in the Thomson Roddick & Medcalf sale of July 18 was a privately printed volume of 1890 containing works by Dante, illustrated by Phoebe Traquair and supplied with notes by J.S. Black.

JUST two days after moving operations to new premises at Coleridge House, Shaddongate, Carlisle, the recently retitled firm Thomson Roddick & Medcalf celebrated with a special book sale and took a bid of £17,500 for one of the privately printed subscriber copies of Seven Pillars of Wisdom issued in 1926.

Silver spirit labels (‘Holland’ refers to Dutch Gin) are not quite two a penny, but they are among the cheapest drinking trinkets available.