Two hundred objects made by or belonging to Man Ray go on sale at Christie’s Paris on March 2, for a total estimate of $3.5 million. The prize among the offerings, which range from lithographs and photographs to books and manuscripts, is the 20th-century artist’s Alphabet pour Adultes. Comprising original drawings and “rayographs”—products of a camera-less photography technique Man Ray discovered by accident in 1922—it’s an A to Z of the Surrealist avant-garde, illustrated by a leader of the pack. READ ON

“The desert could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed.” So muses the desert explorer László de Almásy, the title character of Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel, The English Patient. “Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember.” Almásy is thinking of the vast and volatile sands between Middle Eastern cities, a terrain that quickened the pulse of cartographers and enthralled adventurers such as T. E. Lawrence. READ ON