Auction to support animals.

Tomorrow is one of the highlights of the year for Animal Rights people - The CHRISTMAS WITHOUT CRUELTY FAYRE at Kensington Town Hall, just a few yards from Kensington High Street Tube. 10am-5pm. It will be packed with stalls, so a great place to pick up ethical seasonal presents. There will also be interesting fringe events.

One of the highlights will be the annual auction that I have conducted for several years. I haven't yet seen the auction list, but there are always unusual and tempting ideas. Top lot last year was Tony Benn's pipe. The previous year it was Miss England's bikini.

I will also be running the Green Party stall, so come along and have a word.

BOND CAR FOR AUCTION

On December 1, Bonhams in London will auction off the famous white 1976 Lotus Esprit driven by Roger Moore as James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me (one of two made).

Next to the classic Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger, the Lotus, which was amphibious in the movie, stands out as the iconic Bond vehicle.

Estimated at about $160,000 to $190,000, it does not unfortunately come equipped with the gadgetry deployed by Moore in the film during his eventful ride with the beautiful Barbara Bach, including a cement sprayer, sea-to-air missiles, front-mounted torpedoes, ink-cloud dispenser and mine launcher. However it does afford the purchaser a chance to join the Ian Fleming Foundation.

Battlestar Galactica to be auctioned off.

Battlestar Galactica is coming to an end with its final ever 10 episodes starting in January, when to coincide with it, props, set pieces and costumes are being auctioned off.

Among the items to be auctioned off:

A life-size Viper. A Cylon raider. Admiral Adama’s duty blue uniform. Apollo’s Viper flight suit. Caprica Six’s red dress. Consoles from the CIC. The Arrow of Apollo. Admiral Adama’s painting of the first Cylon war. Colonel Saul Tigh’s eye patch and liquor bottle. President Laura Roslin’s desk. Original production sketches. Set plans and drawings.

Preview Day – Friday, January 16, 2009 – Pasadena Convention Center (Doors open at 10:00 a.m. and close at 6:00 p.m) (Panel schedule to be announced at another date).

Live Auction Day – Saturday, January 17, 2009 (Doors open at 8:00 a.m. Auction begins at 9:00 a.m.).

Live Auction Day – Sunday, January 18, 2009 (Doors open at 9:00 a.m. Auction begins at 10:00 a.m.).

Online Auction of 200 Items – Tuesday, January 20 (Auction goes live at 9:00 a.m. (ET) and will conclude Friday, January 23, starting at 9:00 p.m. (ET).

First of Several Weekly Online Auctions – Beginning on Friday, January 23, weekly online auctions on eBay begin at 9:00 p.m. (ET).

All info is available at www.battlestarprops.com.

Winnie the Pooh honey sketch fetches sweet price

An original sketch by illustrator E. H. Shepard from The House at Pooh Corner has fetched $57,000 at auction in London, well over the pre-sale estimate.

Tiggers Don’t Like Honey shows Pooh dipping his paw in a honey pot, Tigger with a spoon of honey in his mouth and Piglet looking on.

Auctioneer Bonhams of London said the successful telephone bidder was from Germany and he bought the picture for his wife, a long-time Pooh fan.

The sketch, done for the 1928 edition of A. A. Milne’s classic, is by one of Britain’s most famous illustrators.

Shepard also was the artist for Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows, and a sketch called Now pitch in, old fellow, depicting Rat and Mole lounging with a picnic on a riverbank, sold for $13,670.

A signed first edition of The Tailor of Gloucester, about a kind tailor who is helped by little mice, sold for more than $7,000.

Texas Samaritan buys woman her house at auction

A woman distraught over losing her house showed up to watch it auctioned off, but that wasn't the end of the story. Tracy Orr will return home after a stranger bought the house back for her Saturday.

"It means so much to all of us," Orr said. "It's not just a house."

Marilyn Mock said she decided on the spot to buy the house after striking up a conversation with a sobbing Orr at the auction Saturday. Mock was there to help her 27-year-old son bid on a house.

Mock successfully bid $30,000 for Orr's house in Pottsboro. Orr will make payments to her once the deal is finalized.

"She needed help. That was it," Mock said. "I just happened to be there, and anybody else would have done the same thing."

Orr bought the house for $80,000 in 2004 but lost her job a month after taking out the loan. She fell behind on her payments and lost the house this year — an increasingly common story across the nation.

"She didn't even know if I had a job or was a nut case," Orr said in the Wednesday online edition of The Dallas Morning News. "She didn't even see a picture of the house."

The two are waiting on final approval from mortgage giant Fannie Mae before visiting the home. Mock's son also bought a house at the auction.

Mary Pickford's autograph book for auction

H.G. Wells wrote that Mary Pickford was "his life-long devotion", Thomas Edison dedicated his entry to "the sweetheart of the Americas" and Benito Mussolini simply signed his name and the date, May 10, 1926.

More than 120 famous names from 1926 to 1981 signed the silent film star's personal autograph book, which is among more than 750 lots from the Pickford estate going up for auction for the first time on November 22-23

"These books contain the Who's Who of the 1920s and 1930s," said auctioneer Darren Julien of the autograph book and two leather bound guest books signed by visitors to the Pickfair mansion in Beverly Hills shared by Pickford and actor Douglas Fairbanks.

Pickford's autograph book, which also includes dedications from playwright George Bernard Shaw, aviator Amelia Earhart, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and car maker Henry Ford, carries a pre-sale estimate of $6,000-8,000.

That estimate will be exceeded by a huge margin. I predict well over $50,000.

Dinnerware from parties thrown by the Hollywood couple for royalty and the leading minds of the times are also up for sale along with paintings that once graced the walls of Pickfair, as well as furniture, photos and jewellery.

Before the auction, which will be held live, televised and online by Julien's Auctions, highlights of the sale will go on public exhibit at the Beverly Hilton hotel from Nov 17-21.

*Yeats poem sold at auction

A rare first edition of the renowned W B Yeats poem EASTER 1916 has sold for 7,100 euros.

The poem, which was one of just 25 copies privately published the year after the rising. It had been expected to fetch between 3,000 and 4,000 euro at Adam's auctioneers in Dublin.

Written between May and September 1916, the poem sets out Yeats' mixed feelings on the tumultuous event. It was distributed among only a select number of people for fear of its political impact.

There is a first edition copy in the National Library in Dublin and one in the British Library, but the whereabouts of the other 22 copies are unknown.

Prince Charles' and Camilla's 'crude' drawings up for auction

A Fortnum and Mason chocolate box on which the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall scribbled "crude" jokes and drawings 30 years ago is being put up for auction.

The tin shows a picture of Mr Fortnum and Mr Mason delivering Christmas presents in a horse-drawn carriage.

But the Prince and the Duchess have drawn a pile of horse manure and a puddle under the horse and scribbled silly jokes about diarrhoea and yellow rivers.

Both the royals have signed the chocolate box which shows early evidence of their friendship in the late 1970s.

It is expected to fetch up to £600 when it is put up for auction at Ludlow, in Shropshire, later this year.

Richard Westwood-Brookes, of Mullock's Auctioneers, said: "This is clearly the product of a jovial evening between Charles and Camilla.

"As we now know today they were very much in love at this time and some of the comments are somewhat ribald."

Mr Westwood-Brookes said the box had originally been given to member of staff at Blenheim Palace before they acquired it for auction.

Charles and Camilla's signatures on the box have been cross-checked with other documents to make sure they are legitimate.

The Fortnum and Mason box was on sale in Christmas 1977 - three years after the Duchess married Andrew Parker Bowles.

Mr Westwood-Brookes has put an estimated price of £600 on the box but says the bidding could go a lot higher.

$596,000 for Einstein wristwatch

Antiquorum auctioned off Albert Einstein's 1930 Longines wristwatch on Thursday.

The house estimated the watch would fetch up to $35,000. It went for $520,000. (With fees, the total came to $596,000.) That's over 2000% higher than the estimated price, and a record for any Longines at auction.

The watch is inscribed to "Prof. Albert Einstein," and is also marked with the date on which it was presented to him, February 16, 1931.

Rare Sooty puppet to be auctioned

Fans of children's favourite Sooty will have the chance to own an early version of the bear puppet when it is sold at an auction in Derby later this month.

The yellow bear, who was created by puppeteer Harry Corbett, will be sold with a guide price of £200 to £300, although I predict a price of four figures.

Hansons Auctioneer manager Charles Hanson said: "Apparently this puppet was one of Harry Corbett's most cherished ones."

Sooty has been a fixture on children's TV since the 1950s.

The original puppet was bought on Blackpool Pier for 7/6 in 1948.

It was completely yellow but Corbett sewed on a black nose, mouth and ears so that he stood out on black and white TV.

Sooty, who communicated by apparently whispering in Corbett's ear, was later joined by Sweep, a dog puppet and Soo the panda.

The Sooty puppet was given to senior BBC receptionist Violet Marley in 1962.
Ms Marley gave the puppet to her niece, Sally Keene, who has put it up for sale.

Hanson said the auction is "poignant" because Sooty is 60 this year.
"We hope it will find a good home and stay in the country," he said.

Entertainer Richard Cadell recently bought the rights to the bear, with plans to revive the classic puppet for the next generation of children.

Norwich elephants generate £203,000 at auction

The 53 fibreglass model elephants that have graced Norwich this summer were sold at auction this week for a total of £203,000. Seventy five per cent of this will be split between the Born Free Foundation and CLIC Sargent.

'Jemima' by Susan Gunn sold for £25,000 with 'Angel' by Kate Munro selling for £16,000.

The project was created by The Forum Trust in partnership with Wild in Art, and had already raised nearly £200,000 in sponsorship from local businesses.

www.goelephants.co.uk

Jacques Brel notebooks for auction in Paris.

Sotheby's is set to auction off a private collection of notebooks, autographs and memorabilia of iconic singer Jacques Brel who died thirty years ago.

The auction will take place, in Paris, tomorrow, October 8th.

The sale consists of 94 lots, the top item being a notebook that Brel used to jot down the draft lyrics of his masterpiece Amsterdam which is estimated to sell for between 50,000 and 70,000 euros.

Exceptionally Rare Molière Signature for auction. None sold since 1895!

A document calling in a debt, and signed by the French playwright Molière, is to be sold by auctioneers Bonhams & Butterfields on October 15.

Born in 1622, Jean Baptiste Poquelin de Molière is considered the godfather of French theater. His signatures are exceptionally rare – no other examples are known to have been sold in auction since 1895 – and this is believed to be the last in private hands.

The document bearing his signature and dating from 1667 authorizes a certain Claude Le Long to collect a debt that had been owed to the playwright since 1665. Molière had lent the money to a gentleman named François de La Court.

The one-page document was previously sold at auction in Paris in 1860, and purchased by a collector named Dubrunfaut for 950 francs – at the time the second highest price ever paid for a signature in France- befitting Molière’s status as France’s answer to Shakespeare.

This document, signed by Molière in his precise handwriting, is being sold together with two other documents signed by members of his family, and is expected to fetch between $40,000-60,000.

The illustrated auction catalog will be online for review and purchase in the weeks preceding the sale at www.bonhams.com/

Brain Imaging Study Provides New Insight Into Why People Pay Too Much In Auctions

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2008) — Auctions are an old and widely used method for allocating goods that have become increasingly common with the advent of internet auctions sites such as Ebay. Previous economic research has shown that in an auction people tend to bid "too high," or overbid, given the value of the item for sale.
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By combining brain imaging techniques with behavioral economic research, neuroscientists and economists at New York University were able to provide new insight into this tendency to overbid. Specifically, they show that the fear of losing the social competition inherent in an auction may, in part, cause people to pay too much. The research, which suggests an expanded role for neuroscience in understanding economic behavior, appears in the latest issue of the journal Science.

The goal of the study was to provide insight into the neural circuitry of experimental auctions, and then to use this insight to generate and test a novel economic approach to understand overbidding. It was conducted by a team of NYU neuroscientsts and economists. The neuroscientists were NYU Professor Elizabeth Phelps and Mauricio Delgado, now an assistant professor at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. The economists were Andrew Schotter, a professor in NYU's Department of Economics, and Erkut Ozbay, a former NYU doctoral student and now an assistant professor in the University of Maryland's Department of Economics.

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine patterns of brain activation as participants played either an auction game with a partner or a lottery game. In both games participants could win money, but in the auction game winning depended on outbidding a partner. An examination of activation in the striatum, part of the brain's reward circuitry, showed the primary difference when winning or losing in the auction vs. lottery games was an exaggerated response to losses in the auction game. The magnitude of this exaggerated loss response in the striatum during the auction game correlated with the tendency to overbid, suggesting the intriguing hypothesis that perhaps the prospect of losing the social competition inherent in an auction may lead people to bid "too high."
To confirm this hypothesis, a follow-up behavioral economic study was conducted. Three groups of participants played an auction game against a partner under different circumstances. The control group was simply given values and asked to make bids. The Bonus-Frame group was told that if they won the auction, they would also receive a bonus of 15 experimental dollars. The Loss-Frame group was given 15 experimental dollars prior to the auction, but participants were told they would lose the 15 dollars if they failed to win the auction.

In both the Loss and Bonus-Frame conditions, only the winners would get an additional 15 experimental dollars, so the auctions were strategically identical. The difference was simply the way it was framed to emphasize losing or winning. Consistent with the hypothesis that contemplation of loss may, in part, drive overbidding, participants in the Loss-Frame condition consistently bid higher than the other two groups, resulting in a greater potential profit for a hypothetical auctioneer.

According to Schotter, "such a result would not have been predicted by existing economic theory. While there have been investigations of overbidding which have attributed the phenomenon to either risk aversion or the 'joy of winning,' it was the use of imaging data which allowed us to distinguish between these conflicting explanations and actually arrive at a new and different one, the 'fear of losing.' Our results provide evidence of how an understanding of the neural systems of economic behavior might inform economic theory."

"These results highlight a role for the contemplation of social loss in understanding the tendency to bid 'too high' in auctions and emphasize the importance of considering social factors in economic decisions," Phelps explained. "By combining neuroeconomic and behavioral economic techniques we were able to provide novel insight into a classic economic problem."

"Although there have been a number of neuroeconomic studies that have used economic games to further our understanding of brain function, the benefits to traditional behavioral economics as a result are unclear," Delgado added. "Because of recent advances in neuroeconomics and our knowledge of the neural circuitry related to reward, we were able to use neuroimaging results to highlight the importance of framing, and specifically the contemplated loss, as an explanation for overbidding during experimental auctions."

Nelson barrel makes £8,160 in Bonhams auction.

A box believed to be made of wood from a barrel that held Admiral Lord Nelson's body on its voyage back to Britain from the Battle of Trafalgar was sold for £8,160 at auction yesterday.

The box was one of several items of memorabilia associated with the naval hero in a marine sale at Bonhams in London.

They didn’t have deepfreeze in those days, so his body was sent back in a keg of brandy. I read, somewhere, that the sailors tapped the barrel and that the admiral was fairly ‘sniffy’ when it was opened in London.

£1,000,000 note for auction

Spink are to offer a £1m Treasury Note. Dated London 30 August 1948, and printed with the red serial number 000008, it is one of only two surviving examples from the nine thought to have been printed in connection with the Marshall Plan.

They were intended for internal use as “records of movement” and were in use for only a period of six weeks.

Unlike the usual banknotes, which carry a promise from the Bank of England to pay the bearer on demand the sum shown, this Treasury Note states that it “entitles the Bank of England to payment of one million pounds out of the Consolidation Fund of the United Kingdom”.

Number seven was first sold in 1977 and is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as being the highest denomination note in private hands.

Estimate is £40,000 and will be up for auction in Spinks sale on October 1st.

Olympics furniture auction given cold shoulder

The Olympics and Paralympics might have left many Chinese with fond memories, but that isn't translating into buying interest at auctions for memorabilia and furniture used during the events.

More than 60,000 pieces of furniture used during the dual Games, as well as souvenirs, got the cold shoulder at an auction on Thursday, according to the Beijing Times.

The newspaper reported on Friday that the auction, the third of its kind, drew only 17 bidders for beds, mattresses, desks and refrigerators. The items were mainly from two media villages -- North Star and Huiyuan -- and were offered in 18 lots.

Four lots comprising 13,000 items only sold after their asking prices were slashed by 10 percent.

The remaining 14 lots, involving more than 50,000 items, went unsold, said the newspaper.

Einstein’s watch for auction

A Longines watch which belonged to the Nobel Prize winner for the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein, will be auctioned on October, 16th in New York by Antiquorum.

The 14ct gold wristwatch was presented in Einstein in 1931 and is estimated to make $25,000-$35,000

ANIMAL ART AUCTION.

A lion from the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines will be one of several zoo animals whose artwork will be auctioned Tuesday in Milwaukee.

The unusual auction will raise money for the zoos to help with wildlife conservation efforts.

The other artists from around the U.S. include two Milwaukee County Zoo penguins and a porcupine from Pueblo Zoo in Colorado.

Sixty-one items are listed for sale at the live auction. The auction will run from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. and be streamed online.

The Auction Network is holding the sale during the Association of Zoos and Aquariums' annual conference in Milwaukee.

Liquid gold . . . 150-year whisky up for auction

A BOTTLE of Scotch whisky believed to be the oldest in existence is to be auctioned later this month.

The Glenavon Special Liqueur Whisky, believed to be almost 150 years old, is expected to fetch between £5,000 and £10,000 when it goes under the hammer at Bonhams on November 29.

The bottle, which is unusually small in size, contains about 14 fluid ounces of pale gold liquid and is believed to have been bottled by the Glenavon Distillery, in Banffshire, Scotland, between 1851 and 1858.

The precious whisky bottle has been in the family of a woman in Ireland for generations