Gathering nuts

Spectator, The, Nov 8, 2003 by Mount, Harry

Collecting

Barely had it landed on its final flight than Concorde was being stripped for collectors. And it's only a couple of weeks before the first auction related to the aircraft, Christie's Souvenirs du Concorde, takes place in Paris on 15 November. Want a nose cone? It'll need some explaining before your dinner-party guests can work out what it is: detached from the fuselage, it looks more like a 9 ft Ku Klux Klan hat than the most famous bit of the most famous plane ever. And it'll cost you L10,000.

If that's outside your budget, you can go for a cabin window panel, signed - with handprints - by members of the Concorde maintenance team: yours for L100.

That's the thing about collections. If you want to charge the earth for anything, all you need is another obsessive who wants your Concorde nose cone more than you do. Choose the right thing, and you're away. John Rezinkoff, of Connecticut, plumped for celebrity hair as his speciality and now has a collection of more than 115 locks. His brief is a tight one: he sticks to real A-List samples. His prize piece, for which he was offered $50,000, belonged to Abraham Lincoln. He is eagerly on the lookout for hair belonging to other presidents and his real dream is to get hold of the long, dank strands that dropped down around the edge of Shakespeare's bald patch.

The great spiritual home of the collector of odd things is the Internet site eBay (www.ebay.co.uk). It might be Garfield dolls; it might be weight-loss pills; it might be ouija boards: they're all there. You log on, place a bid and, if it's not topped by another bid in the time allotted, the thing is yours. At the moment, there's a Roy of the Rovers 1981 annual (condition: 'Nice') going for L4.25, a Giles cartoons Christmas book for L4.99, and a Stormtrooper Action Man for L82. And it's not just trivia; first editions can be picked up on the cheap. At the last time of looking, there was a Lucky Jim going for L100, an Edward Ardizzone 1937 first edition, Lucy Brown and Mr Grimes, for L87, and a Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife, for L500.

But if you're not interested in selling, you don't even need the existence of other collectors to justify your own. You could get up tomorrow and, like Graham Parker, from Perth, Australia, decide to start collecting your own navel fluff. He began in 1984 and now has up to half an ounce of the stuff, which he keeps in his bathroom.

If you are serious about collecting for money as well as, like Mr Parker, indulging your taste for things beautiful, certain fields are booming. Cinema posters are in vogue, particularly anything to do with Humphrey Bogart. A mint poster for Key Largo, which he starred in with Lauren Bacall and Edward G. Robinson, goes for L5,000. And, if you can get your hands on an original Casablanca poster, you may equal the European auction records, held by a Casablanca poster - in French, mind - which went for L54,300 in 2000.

James Bond, too, is an excellent brand, constantly improving and still affordable. A mint Dr No poster goes for L900. Oddjob's steel-rimmed bowler from Goldfinger went for L62,000 in 1998. In fact, anything Ian Fleming-related is quickly snapped up. His gold-plated typewriter went for L55,750 in 1995 - still the auction record for a typewriter.

Celebrity generally is on the up. Antiquity matters less than fame: Fred Perry's Slazenger racket, which he used at Wimbledon in the 1930s, fetched L23,000 recently. The red England shirt worn by Geoff Hurst when he scored his hat-trick in the 1966 World Cup Final went for L91,750.

And it doesn't have to be 'good' celebrity. The nasty stuff is just as popular. An American Waltham gilt-metal pocket watch - the one that Dr Crippen wore when he killed his wife and dismembered her body, that he then wore on his escape to America, where he was apprehended (the first murderer to be caught by the aid of telegraphy) - went to a rich ghoul for L10,350 in 1997.

Quirkiness is all very well. But what about the things that just plain look nice while quietly gathering value in the corner of the sitting-room? Furniture and pictures still dominate the auction rooms, and there are still bargains to be picked up. You can buy a picture of the Holy Family, after Rubens, a variation of the picture in the Prado; or a Madonna, after Raphael, for a grand.

If you've been taken by Andrew Lloyd Webber's Pre-Raphaelite collection at the Royal Academy and want to follow in the melodic peer's footsteps, it's not difficult. Lord Lloyd-Webber is still kicking himself about the time he missed out on Lord Leighton's Flaming June, going for L50 in a Fulham Road junk shop in the early Sixties. A few years later, it failed to meet its reserve price of L100. It was then promptly snapped up by the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico where it has remained ever since. In 1990, Leighton's Dante in Exile, a far less significant work, fetched L1 million at auction. Flaming June would be expected to reach at least L10 million, a cool 20,000,000 per cent return on the Fulham Road price tag.