The contents of the Café Royal, a favourite haunt of Oscar Wilde’s, will be dispersed among collectors, literati, and bibliophiles at the Bonhams sale on Tuesday 20 January 2009.

Frequented by royalty, Hollywood, politicians and bohemia, The Café Royal has thrived on the glamour and scandal of its clientele for decades. The London Landmark has not only served the world’s most renowned and notorious film stars, writers, artists, politicians and royals, but also served as a stage for the many dramas of the rich and famous.

In January next year Bonhams will be offering up over 120 lots from this historic establishment, following the Café’s closure forever on Monday 22 December to be turned into a five star hotel.

Bidders can acquire a small piece of the iconic institute from humidors and brandy caskets taken from its legendary cellars to the opulent Venetian chandeliers, which hang in the Napoleon suite. Also included is the Café Royal’s original boxing ring, which has been used at many of the black tie boxing events held over the years.

Established in 1865, the Café Royal’s regulars include: Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Noel Coward, Sir Winston Churchill, Cary Grant, Brigitte Bardot, Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Diana, Mick Jagger, Margaret Thatcher, Virginia Woolf, Muhammad Ali and Yul Brynner.

http://www.caferoyal.co.uk/

Ketterter Kunst’ s two-day sale in Hamburg held on the 18 - 19th November saw Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe achieve a fine price, and a Transsylvanus letter fetch €114,000.  The evening auction alone achieved overall proceeds amounting to €550,000, which outstripped an estimated sales volume of €450,000.



Robert Ketterer, auctioneer and owner of Ketterer Kunst, said: “This result is highly gratifying because it demonstrates that the field of rare books, a long established field, proves its worth particularly in these economically precarious times.”

The extremely rare original letter written by Maximilianus Transsylvanus, secretary to the imperial court of Charles V, achieved the highest price at this auction when it sold for €114,000, and surpassed the €94,300 already achieved at Ketterer Kunst in 2004 for one of the four published editions of “De Moluccis insulis ...”. A European dealer secured the letter with a sealed bid in writing that would have left some scope for bidding up.

http://www.kettererkunst.com/

And the Dylan Thomas prize goes to...

Nam Le, the Vietnamese-born writer has been awarded the £60,000 Dylan Thomas prize for his first collection of short stories, the Boat.

At the ceremony held on Monday 10 November in Swansea, the chairman of the judges, Peter Florence, hailed Le as a “winner worthy of Dylan Thomas.”

"Nam tackles his own background and circumstances as well as that of others with a clear eye, focused intelligence and wonderful use of words," Florence said. "He is, in this panel's opinion, a phenomenal literary talent, and I look forward to following his career as it progresses."



Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia, giving the writer a wide scope for his stories’ settings, which range in location from the streets of Tehran to a tiny Australian fishing village. 



Le fought off competition from last year's winner of the Guardian first book award, Dinaw Mengestu, as well as Ross Raisin, shortlisted for this year's Guardian award. They were joined on the Dylan Thomas shortlist by the 22-year-old poet Caroline Bird, as well as debut novelists Ceridwen Dovey and Edward Hogan.    

http://www.namleonline.com/

The American collector John Wolfson has named London’s Globe theatre as the sole beneficiary of his remarkable 450-work collection, which includes a copy of the first folio, the earliest collection of Shakespeare's plays and other editions of the folio.

Of the 750 first folios that were published in 1623 – seven years after the bard’s death - only about 230 are known to be in existence, and the Folger Library in Washington owns 79 of these. The folio includes eighteen plays that have otherwise disappeared, and copies have grown increasingly expensive in recent years, with Sotheby's setting a British auction house record in 2006 when it sold a copy for £2.8m.

Wolfson's generous donation, to be made following his death, also includes a multi-million-pound selection of works by Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson, Thomas Middleton and John Ford, among others.

http://www.shakespeares-globe.org/