Two of Britain’s second-tier auctioneers have announced a strategic alliance that would make them, combined, one of the largest UK auctioneers. Bloomsbury Auctions, which specializes in books and works on paper, has branches in London, New York, and Rome, and achieved thirty-seven million dollars of sales last year. Dreweatts has five regional auction rooms in the UK and notched up twenty-six million dollars of sales in 2008.

Between them, ninety-thousand lots were offered for sale in the year. Bloomsbury holds the world records for modern first editions by J.K. Rowling and Ian Fleming. Dreweatts recently sold a pair of portraits by Jean-Baptiste Greuze belonging to David Cameron’s family for over one million dollars. Dreweatts is the trading name of the Fine Art Auction Group, which, with city backing, has gradually been acquiring strategically placed auction rooms in the south of England.

Meanwhile, Stephan Ludwig, Dreweatts’s chairman, who will become a non-executive chairman of Bloomsbury’s holding company, Stocklight, said that he will be kick-starting Dreweatts’s reentry into the urban art market after witnessing the enormous interest in the Banksy exhibition at Bristol City Art Gallery. Dreweatts will be holding a charity auction in Bristol in October, and commercial sales of urban art in Bristol and London early next year, he said.

In other news, Freeman’s Auction House in Philadelphia is set to sell off the first “tranche” of art from the Lehman Brothers corporate collection in three upcoming sales November 1, 2009, December 6, 2009, and February 12, 2010, according to Artnet. The eclectic 650 lots include works by Bernice Abbott, Louis Bourgeouis, Herbert Brandl, Bernard Cathelin, Willie Cole, Terry Frost, Arturo Herrera, Roy Lichtenstein, Louis Lozowick, Pouran Jinchi, and Bernar Venet. The total of this segment of Lehman Brothers’ collection is valued at one million dollars.