Comic Cuts, Whizzer & Chips, Valiant, Tiger, Eagle and The Dandy; and to top them all, of course, The Beano, which at its height enjoyed sales of close to 2 million copies a week. The comics of our youth are part of the defining culture of post-war Britain until the dawn of the internet. So you can imagine the excitement when it was recently announced that a copy of the first ever Beano annual, from 1940 – although released in 1939 – was coming up for auction.

The annual from Dundee publishers DC Thomson set the tone for the decades to come, with larger than life characters getting into various scrapes amid an anarchic landscape.

None of the most famous characters appeared in the first weekly edition of The Beano, published in July 1938, except for Lord Snooty and his pals. Dennis the Menace and Gnasher did not appear until 1952, Minnie the Minx two years later and The Bash Street Kids a few months after that. Except for Dennis, all were created by the great Leo Baxendale, who died only last year, aged 86.

The Beano annual, expected to fetch £1200-1500, actually sold for £2700. I would be fascinated to see what an original Baxendale cartoon strip featuring Plug, Smiffy or Minnie would make today.

On August 29 we are honoured to be selling a collection of gilt Easter eggs, filled with surprises, by the late great Stuart Devlin.

An Australian by birth, Devlin designed that nation’s first decimal coinage in the mid 1960s, as well as creating the medals for Australia’s new honours system a decade later.

By that time he had already made a considerable name for himself across several continents and had undertaken a travel scholarship at the Royal College of Art in London from 1958 to 1960, having gained the highest marks ever studying gold and silversmithing at Melbourne Technical College.

Opening a workshop in Clerkenwell, London (followed by several others), Devlin gave employment to craftsmen and women while he developed new designs, techniques and ideas, creating wonders in jewellery, cutlery, candlesticks and other homewares, as well as trophies, clocks and masterpieces like his range of Christmas boxes and decorative eggs, each containing a bejewelled surprise and still, astonishingly, valued at only a few hundred pounds each.

I was amazed to discover that this genius, who sadly passed away in Chichester on April 12, had designed coins and medals for no fewer than 36 countries in his time.

As a worthy Royal Warrant holder, he became Prime Warden of the Goldsmith’s Company from 1996-97.

As I said at the top of the piece, it is an honour to be marking his passing by celebrating the man’s work in this way.

As I write this, the weather doesn’t look terribly promising for what is being billed as the best Perseid meteor shower in decades tonight. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the clouds will part in time for what is often an exciting spectacle, especially as a new Moon accompanies it, which means that there is very little risk of it outshining the meteors, which can appear at a rate of up to 100 an hour as they streak across Earth’s atmosphere.

Actually, it is the Earth that passes through what is effectively a patch of rubble in space, creating this amazing natural phenomenon each year, but for me, it also acts as a reminder of one of the fastest growing collectible disciplines on the planet: photographs and ephemera linked to the Space programme.

Auction prices have been climbing steadily as the 50th anniversary of the first man on the Moon approaches. Anything to do with NASA missions, from Mercury and Gemini through to the Apollo programmes in the US, culminating in Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin’s famous Apollo 11 mission, come at the top of the list as collectors anticipate July 20 next year, half a century on from the game-changing Moon landing and that Giant Step.

Personally, I would like to have a copy of the 1965 photo Earthrise, the first vision of the Earth as it appeared from behind the Moon, as taken by Bill Anders on December 24, 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission. Examples of that have already made five figures at auction.

Apparently more than six million workers are worried that they could be replaced by robots in the next decade. Should I be worried? After all, fine art and antique auctions have been at the cutting edge of online development over the past 15 years and we can now offer live online and timed auctions, as well as hybrid auctions, to buyers from all over the world from our Fernhurst saleroom these days.

Time was when most bidders would be in the room, with a few on the phone and the odd commission bid, and you’d be lucky to have a range of bidders from the local area, a bit further afield, across the nation and possibly from one or two other countries. Now, thanks to the internet and the focus of technology on the bidding process, bidders from 50 countries is not unknown for a single sale at our auction room on the Surrey/Sussex border.

But replacing the auctioneer with a robot is another issue altogether. People talk about Artificial Intelligence taking over, but, as far as I can see, we’re no closer to real ‘AI’ than we were twenty years ago. You need years of experience and skill to read a room and tickle bids from someone at the other end of a fibre optic cable. Psychology, a sense of theatre and a bit of human nature is what does the trick, not a microchip… and that’s the way it will always be if you want the system to work!