A highlight of next year’s Festival includes a major exhibition which celebrates the centenary of George V’s (1910-1936) accession to the throne. “Empire Mail: George V and the GPO”, opens at the prestigious Guildhall Art Gallery, in the heart of the City of London, 7 May and runs until July 25, 2010. Many items from the BPMA’s unique collections will be on display in this exhibition that explores the life of King George V, who became known as the Philatelist King through his personal passions as a stamp collector. Featuring posters, vehicles, pillar boxes, philatelic rarities and gems from the GPO Film Unit, “Empire Mail: George V and the GPO” will display themes from the King’s reign such as innovations in mail transportation, the first Atlantic air crossing, the rise of graphic design in the 1920s and 1930s and war-time memorabilia.

One of the first events of the Festival is “Post Abolition: Commemorative Stamps From Around The World” (18 January 2010 – 30 June 2010). This new display in the London, Sugar and Slavery Gallery of the Museum of London Docklands looks at how the abolition of slavery has been commemorated through the everyday postage stamp.

Other events taking place across London and beyond include displays at the British Library; British Museum; Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum; and a celebration of the 150th anniversary of Battersea Dogs & Cats Home with stamps featuring cats and dogs. There’s also a walking tour which explores 400 years of postal history and developments in the iconic street furniture of telephone kiosks and letter boxes. The tour takes in former GPO buildings, and the sites of old coffee houses and inns which were at the heart of communications across the empire.

Douglas Muir, Curator of Philately, The British Postal Museum & Archive said: “the London 2010: Festival of Stamps offers something for everyone – whether you’re an enthusiast of international rugby, African culture or more broadly interested in geography or history, or design in the 1920s and 30s. The Festival not only aims to fascinate keen stamp collectors and philatelists but anyone with an interest in design and the world.”

The sale will feature over 290 lots with estimates ranging from £200 to £50,000. A broad spectrum of items will be offered including furniture, works of art, Old Master, Continental and British pictures, watercolours, silver, Asian art, sporting art, miniatures, clocks, books and manuscripts and medals. The collection is expected to realize in the region of £400,000.

The sale includes items once in the collection of Alexander Davison (1750-1829), who worked for more than twenty years as a government contractor, providing uniforms, weapons, transport and supplies. He was very well connected with leading political figures, and his government contracts enabled him to build up a lucrative business. The profits from this helped him to buy a substantial house in St. James’s Square, London, where he regularly entertained Horatio Nelson and other leading figures of the day, including the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Clarence and William Pitt. He was soon wealthy enough to purchase, Swarland Hall and Park, Northumberland, and he spent a fortune improving the house and grounds and buying adjacent land, in addition to building an extensive collection of paintings, as well as fine collections of porcelain, jewels and books.

A highlight of the sale is a George III quilted mahogany veneered and Honduran mahogany four pedestal dining-table, circa 1790 (estimate: £30,000-50,000), listed in the Inventory and Valuation of the contents of Newton Hall, Felton, Morpeth, Northumberland, The Property of Brigadier General B. F. Widdrington, C.M.G., D.S.O., 1925, p. 22., as `made from mahogany brought by Lord Nelson from the West Indies.’ Nelson served in the West Indies from 1777-1780. On December 8, 1778, he was appointed commander of the Badger and was sent to protect the Mosquito shore and the Bay of Honduras, from American privateers. Other items brought to Newton Hall from Swarland Hall include a George III mahogany traveling chest, late 18th-century (estimate £1,000-1,500) and sixteen volumes of Drawings faithfully copied from Nature at Naples … dedicated to … Sir William Hamilton by the artist Frederick Rehberg [London]: 1794 (estimate: £1,000-1,500) given to Alexander Davison by Nelson in 1803.

A fine selection of paintings is included in the sale, led by a gallant ancestral portrait of Sir William Widdrington, 2nd Baron Widdrington of Blankney (d.1675) by Jacob Huysmans (Antwerp 1630-1696 London) (estimate: £30,000-50,000). A number of beautiful British works also feature, such as Thomas Stringer (British, 1722-1790), An equestrian portrait of a gentleman, traditionally identified as Mr. Heron, mounted on a bay hunter, with hounds in a landscape (estimate: £10,000-15,000), and a fine oil painting commissioned by Shalcross Fitzherbert Widdrington (1826-1917) by Edward Lear (British, 1812-1888), “The Tiber, and the Campagna of Rome, looking Eastward towards Antemnae, Monte Gennaro, and Monte Vellino” (estimate: £20,000-30,000).

Christina Prescott-Walker, Head of European Ceramics and Chinese Export porcelain, commented, “We are delighted to be offering the private collection of Elinor Gordon, who was truly a pioneer of the field, and to be able to celebrate her love of collecting. Representing a broad range of interests and prices, this collection offers something for every collector at every level. From European market wares to American market pieces to armorial porcelain, it has been a great joy for us to discover Elinor’s gems, and to imagine how much fun she must have had acquiring them.”

Highlights of the collection include an ‘Order of the Cincinnati’ Plate, circa 1785 from the earliest service decorated with the order owned by George Washington and Henry Lee (est. $30/50,000), along with three pieces from other services decorated with the badge of the Society of the Cincinnati. Other top works include two pieces in the ‘Fitzhugh’ pattern, a green and orange dinner plate and an ‘American Eagle Decorated Platter’ (est. $5/7,000 and $12/18,000 respectively), as well as a ‘Pair of Hounds’ from the late 18th-century (est. $10/15,000).

Other top pieces of the collection include:

Rare Chinese Export tea bowl and saucer painted with the state seal of New Hampshire, made for John A. Colby of New Hampshire

circa 1805

Diameter of saucer 5 5/8 inches

Est. $2,000-3,000

Chinese Export figure of a reclining deer

Qianlong Period, late 18th-century

Length 7 1/2 inches

Est. $15,000-25,000

Chinese Export shipping plate, depicting the “Friendship” of Salem, Massachusetts

Circa 1820

Diameter 10 inches

Est. $6,000-8,000

Chinese School: View of Hong Kong Island

watercolor and gouache on paper

length 43 inches

Est. $20,000-30,000

Very rare Chinese Export teapot stand from William Eustis’s Second Order of the Cincinnati Service

Circa 1790

Length 7 1/8 inches

Est. $12,000-15,000

Rare Chinese Export teapot stand from William Eustis’s Order of the Cincinnati Service

Circa 1790

Width 6 5/8 in.

Est. $15,000-25,000

Pair of Chinese Export figures of hounds

Late 18th-century

Height 9 1/2 inches

Est. $10,000-15,000

Divers and underwater archeologists used a giant crane and ropes to lift the 9-ton, 7.4-foot-tall pylon from the murky waters Thursday.

The tower was originally part of the entrance to a temple of Isis, a pharaonic goddess of fertility and magic. The temple is believed to have been near the palace that belonged to the 1st century BC Queen Cleopatra in the ancient city of Alexandria, submerged in the sea centuries ago.

The pylon is to be the centerpiece of a planned underwater museum featuring relics uncovered from the Mediterranean seabed.

Towns in the province of Perugia reported buildings lightly damaged by the temblor, monitored by Italy’s national institute of geophysics.

Italy’s agriculture minister said Tuesday 600 people were evacuated until their homes can be inspected. Mayors of several hamlets ordered schools closed Wednesday for inspections.

Video of the city of Perugia showed bricks in the street and some damage to walls. The American student Amanda Knox, convicted this month of murdering her British roommate, is in Capanne prison outside Perugia.

In April, a quake hit the Abruzzo region in central Italy, killing about 300 and leaving tens of thousands of homeless.

Making his way through the Berghof, Hitler’s home near Berchtesgaden, Germany, Pistone noticed a table with shelves underneath. Exhilarated by the certainty of victory over the Nazis, Pistone took an album filled with photographs of paintings as a souvenir.

“It was really a great feeling to be there and we knew, by that time, he was on his last leg,” Pistone told The Associated Press.

This photo taken on Dec. 2, 2009 in Dallas shows a page from a lost album that once belonged to Adolf Hitler, part of a series compiled for Hitler featuring photographs of art he wanted for his "Fuehrermuseum," a planned museum in Linz, Austria. The book, taken by U.S. serviceman John Pistone during World War II from Hitler's home, is expected to be formally returned to Germany in a ceremony at the U.S. State Department in January. The picture in the album shows the 1864 painting "Siesta am Hofe der Mediceer" by Hans Makart

Sixty-four years after Pistone brought the album home to Ohio, the 87-year-old has learned its full significance: It’s part of a series compiled for Hitler featuring art he wanted for his “Fuhrermuseum,” a planned museum in Linz, Austria.

Pistone’s album is expected to be formally returned to Germany in a ceremony at the U.S. State Department in January. Germany has 19 other albums discovered at the Berchtesgaden complex that are part of a 31-album collection of works either destined for or being considered for the Linz museum.

Pistone’s 3-inch thick, 12-pound album’s journey from obscurity began this fall when a friend became curious about the book sitting on Pistone’s bookshelf.

Robert Edsel, founder of the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, holds a lost album that once belonged to Adolf Hitler

The friend discovered after some Internet searching that the Dallas-based Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art was involved in 2007 in the restitution of two other albums that were part of a series documenting art stolen by the Nazis from Jewish families.

Its founder, Robert Edsel, who while living in Italy for a time after selling his oil and gas business became interested in what was done to protect art in World War II, traveled to Ohio this fall to examine Pistone’s album. Seeing it convinced him that Pistone had one of the missing albums of the series on the planned museum.

Stamped on the album’s spine is “Gemaldegalerie Linz” — Gemaldegalerie means picture gallery in German — and the Roman numerals for 13. It still has a sticker from the book’s binder in Dresden.

Birgit Schwarz, a German art historian from Vienna who has written books about Hitler and art, including a book called “Hitler’s Museum” describing the series album, is convinced the album is authentic. She said she recognized paintings in the album along with the volume number and title.

“It’s absolutely clear!” she wrote in an enthusiastic e-mail to the AP after reviewing scanned photographs of the album. “Hans Makart’s ‘Pest in Florenz’ (Plague in Florence), for example, the first picture of album XIII, Hitler got as a gift from Mussolini!”

Souvenir hunting was routine by soldiers during the war, and problems arise when people try to sell rather than return culturally important items, said Thomas R. Kline, a Washington-based lawyer who specializes in art restitution and works for the foundation.

“It’s really important that as people go through their attics and they find the things that grandpa brought home, people are aware that something as simple as a book of pictures could have a cultural significance,” Kline said.

Ambassador J. Christian Kennedy, special envoy for Holocaust issues at the State Department, said the agency is happy to help return of objects taken during the war. “This is all about doing the right thing,” Kennedy said.

Edsel started his foundation in 2007 to honor and continue the work of the original Monuments Men, the roughly 345 men and women from 13 nations who helped Allied forces protect cultural treasures during World War II. After the war, they began trying to find the rightful owners of pieces of art looted by the Nazis, hundreds of thousands of which are still missing.

“It’s my desire to see the works of the Monuments Men completed,” said Edsel, who wrote two books detailing the group’s work.

The discovery of albums could help. In Pistone’s case, experts had the names of artwork featured in his album but the photographs could help match them to the correct piece of art, Edsel said.

“They are key documents from the crime scene,” he said of the albums.

He said the art Hitler wanted for his museum was bought, stolen or confiscated. The 13th album contains works by some of Hitler’s favorite German painters, including a photo of Adolf von Menzel’s painting of Frederick the Great that hung in Hitler’s office in Munich.

Edsel said his office gets about a call a day from someone curious about an item brought home after the war.

“We’re looking for people with goodwill who don’t know what they have,” Edsel said.

Pistone, album in hand, returned home after surviving the battlefields in Europe. He finished college, got into the restaurant business and had five children. The album mostly stayed up on a shelf at his home in Beachwood, Ohio, but he’d occasionally take it down and let family members look through it.

Once he met Edsel and learned about the Monuments Men, he knew it should be returned to Germany. “I just wanted to get it in the right hands,” he said.

Before the book makes the trip overseas, it and one of two other albums the foundation helped discover will go on display for about three months at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans following the State Department ceremony, Edsel said.

Edsel said that of the two albums from 2007, one has already been donated to the U.S. National Archives to join the other albums in that series used as evidence of Nazi looting in the Nuremberg trials. He said that the second will go to the National Archives in the next three years.

“When soldiers and their families realize what they have and come forward to return it, there’s never an issue. It’s a happy moment and there’s celebrations of one kind of another,” Kline said. “We owe a huge debt to this generation that saved the world from Naziism.”

Washington’s 1787 letter to nephew Bushrod Washington argues for the ratification of the newly drafted Constitution.

The letter had been owned by descendants of Bushrod Washington for more than 100 years, Christie’s said. The buyer was not identified.

The letter’s rarity was the reason it commanded well over its pre-sale estimate of $1.5 million to $2.5 million at the auction Friday at Rockefeller Center, said an auction house spokeswoman.

The previous record for a Washington letter was $834,500. It was set at a Christie’s auction in 2002.

A volume of poetry and a partial poem handwritten by Edgar Allan Poe also set world records during an earlier auction Friday, Christie’s said.

A bidding war over the poem was won by an American collector who bid $830,500, a world record for a 19th-century literary manuscript, Christie’s said. The eight verses of the 16-verse poem “For Annie” was estimated to sell for $50,000 to $70,000.

A rare first edition of Poe’s first book, “Tamerlane and Other Poems,” sold for $662,500 at the same auction, the highest price ever paid for a 19th-century book of poetry.

Only 12 copies of the 40-page volume of poetry, published in 1827, are known to remain. It had a pre-sale estimate of between $500,000 to $700,000.

A Christie’s spokeswoman did not immediately have a previous auction record for works by Poe.

The metal Olivetti typewriter Cormac McCarthy used while writing his novels, including “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men,” sold at the afternoon auction for an eye-popping $254,500. It had been estimated to sell for $15,000 to $20,000.

McCarthy also invited the winner to join him for lunch at the Sante Fe Institute. The 76-year-old writer donated the auction’s proceeds to the nonprofit institute in New Mexico.

The prices include a buyer’s premium of 20 percent for items from $50,000 to $1 million and 12 percent for items above $1 million.

Trailblazing will offer unprecedented public access to the most influential, inspiring and intriguing papers published by the Royal Society over the last 350 years including the world-famous Philosophical Transactions (Phil. Trans.), the oldest continuously published scientific journal in the world.

Leading scientists and historians have chosen 60 articles from amongst the 60,000 published since the journal first began in 1665. Trailblazing will make the original manuscripts available online for the first time alongside fascinating insights from modern-day experts who are continuing the work of scientific giants such as Newton, Hooke, Faraday and Franklin and making vital new breakthroughs of their own in areas such as genetics, physics, climate change and medicine.

Highlights include:

• The gruesome account of an early blood transfusion (1666)

• Captain James Cook’s explanation of how he protected his crew from scurvy aboard HMS Resolution (1776)

• Stephen Hawking’s early writing on black holes (1970)

• Benjamin Franklin’s account of flying a kite in a storm to identify the electrical nature of lightning – the Philadelphia Experiment (1752)

• Sir Isaac Newton’s landmark paper on the nature of light and colour (1672)

• A scientific study of a young Mozart confirming him as a musical child genius (1770)

• The Yorkshire cave discovery of the fossilized remains of elephant, tiger, bear and hyena heralding the study of deep time (1822)

Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, said: “The scientific papers on Trailblazing represent a ceaseless quest by scientists over the centuries, many of them Fellows of the Royal Society, to test and build on our knowledge of humankind and the universe. Individually they represent those thrilling moments when science allows us to understand better and to see further.

“As it begins its 350th anniversary year, the Royal Society will not only be celebrating its proud history but looking to the future of science in the UK and in the rest of the world, as the great scientific questions that tested our predecessors are rapidly replaced by new and urgent scientific challenges. Throughout the year, the Royal Society will be running an exciting nationwide programme of events and activities, many in conjunction with other scientific and cultural institutions, to inspire scientists, families, young people and interested members of the public alike to see further into science.”

The anniversary year’s events will include a nine day science festival at Southbank Centre (incorporating the Royal Society’s annual Summer Science Exhibition and the UK premiere of Brian Green and Philip Glass’s Icarus at the Edge of Time, as well as a variety of other cultural events integrating science and the arts). In addition, the Royal Society will also be working with museums, galleries and other institutions, both in London and throughout the UK, to celebrate science and scientists. Other elements of the anniversary programme will include the opening of the new Kavli Royal Society International Centre for the Advancement of Science, a book telling the story of science and the Royal Society, and cutting edge scientific meetings on the biggest challenges facing science in the future.

The daunting task of selecting the 60 Trailblazing papers was the work of a small group of scientists, communicators and historians chaired by Professor Michael Thompson FRS, who himself edited Phil. Trans. for many years. Professor Thompson said:

“It was a great thrill for all of us selecting articles for their novelty, pivotal science and often just plain fun. In doing so we had to maintain a balance between the disciplines (astronomy, biology, chemistry, Earth science, mathematics, physics and engineering), while stirring in a peppering of iconic names (Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, etc). The aim was to make an inspiring and tasty dish for today’s scientists, for the public at large, and of course for the youngsters who will be the scientists of tomorrow.”

Trailblazing is online from today, 30 November, at http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org