There were a number of exceptional results in last week’s Islamic sales in London, even though as much as 50 per cent of lots in some sales failed to sell. Bonhams took £458,500 for an 18th-century watercolour of a fruit bat, more than doubling the price Christie’s sold it for six years ago. A single Iznik pottery bowl of c.1510, also at Christie’s, fetched a record £1.4 million, and a handsome bearded royal portrait from Persia, c.1820, made top price of the week at £3 million.

The biggest surprise was a record £458,500 for a modern Egyptian sculpture at Sotheby’s. Au Bord du Nil, the two-foot art deco bronze of a water carrier, by Mahmoud Mokhtar, had been estimated at just £50,000. A small version of the life-size marble that stands outside the entrance to the Mokhtar Museum in Cairo, it was bought by a Middle Eastern collector who is building their own museum.

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Not for the first time under the directorship of Gregor Muir, the Institute for Contemporary Arts in Pall Mall is one step ahead of the market. Tomorrow, the ICA opens the first solo British exhibition for one of the hottest contemporary American artists, Tauba Auerbach. According to the auction price data base, Artprice, Auerbach became the most expensive artist born after 1980 at auction last year when her abstract painting Fold, made in 2010, sold for $1 million. Upstairs, the ICA has another scoop in the shape of an exhibition for the artist David Robilliard who was discovered by Gilbert and George in 1979, but died in 1988. He has been somewhat neglected since then, but Tate recently bought a few works that will be included in the ICA exhibition.

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Where can you buy prints by Richard Long, the Turner Prize-winning land artist famous for his walks and stone circles? His gallery, Lisson, don’t sell them; there aren’t any scheduled for next week’s London Original Print Fair at the Royal Academy; and auctions rarely include them because they don’t usually fetch more than £1,000.

The answer is you have to shop around the various publishers he has used over the years. But first stop should be to visit an exhibition at the New Art Gallery Walsall, which opens the first comprehensive exhibition of Long’s prints today, coinciding with the publication of a catalogue raisonné of all the prints and who published them. The gallery is offering to throw in the £25 catalogue for free to anyone who buys a £295 signed limited-edition print, No Footprints, made for the exhibition.

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A group of colourful illustrated satirical maps made during the First World War are to be offered by Bloomsbury Auctions in London next week. “Kill that Eagle” reads one, illustrated by John Henry Amshewitz, as John Bull rolls up his sleeves for action (£800). “Hark! Hark! The Dogs do Bark!” reads another, explaining that a dog fight is taking place in Europe, “started by a dachshund that is thought to have gone mad”(£600).