Caption: Customers read the menu at the restaurant Rubro in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2015. Food historian and author Nathalie Cooke says a menu is not just a portal between you and the kitchen — ...

The very first auction that Christie’s conducted, back in London in 1766, was a single-owner collection sale of objects only identified as “the property of a Noble Personage (Deceas’d).” Presumably, ...