Collecting for Fun and (Maybe) Profit

A single postage stamp was auctioned last year for a record-shattering $280,000. The sale blew minds all over Wall Street. Whenever stocks are falling and inflation raging (and especially when both occur at once), the investment potential of collector's items--stamps, coins, paintings, rare books, autographs, antiques and all the rest--seems especially promising. In this instance, the facts had all the allure of lucre. The stamp, shown here, is the fabled "penny magenta" of British Guiana, the only one known to exist. The seller had purchased the stamp in 1940 for a mere $42,000. And the buyer was not one of your nutty millionaire stamp freaks but a syndicate of eight hardheaded businessmen, most of whom wouldn't know a rare postage stamp if it came to them on a corporate report.

"If you think the stock market was running wild with speculation in 1968 and 1969," rhapsodized Forbes magazine, "take a look at what's going on in postage-stamp collecting." Rare-stamp prices, the magazine's experts declared, "have been rising year to year, without pause, at an annual rate of between 10 percent and 25 percent. What these figures mean is that prices have been going up somewhere between 150 percent and 800 percent every decade. Thus, a $10,000 stamp today could be expected to be worth somewhere between $25,000 and $90,000 by 1980.... In 1960 it might well have gone for somewhere between $100 and $400."

These statistics must have titillated Forbes's stock-worn readers. But unfortunately, the Forbes figures simply are not true. The penny magenta itself, had anyone cared to examine the details of its history and consult a compound-interest table, would have been found to have yielded the man who sold it an annual return, over 30 long years, not of 25 percent or 10 percent but just a shade over 5 percent before taxes. Since this was considerably less than the yield then available from bank savings accounts (not to mention tax-free municipal bonds), no wonder the seller decided to bail out.

The term collector investment can embrace literally any that collectors are fond enough to pay for. An exhibit of Dürer engravings alongside a well-mounted showing of fossilized dinosaur droppings would illustrate quite clearly how collector tastes range from the rarefied to the ridiculous. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a man of means could tie up a fortune in birds' nests. This hobby, like many of the birds themselves, has all but vanished, though the lavish and well-wrought cabinets that wealthy nest nuts commissioned to display their treasures are now highly sought after--in fact, they are collector's items. More recently, collectors have bid avidly not only for dinosaur dung but also for barbed wire, millstones, baseball cards, old golf clubs, horse-drawn fire engines, player pianos, even woodpecker holes. A cursory reading of one issue of Collectors News, a marvelous monthly newspaper originating from the mid-American communications mecca of Grundy Center, Iowa, reveals hard-cash markets for (among other things) used streetcar transfers, empty beer cans, Kewpie dolls, erector sets, orgone boxes, stagecoach passes, brass doorknobs, railroad timetables, chauffeur's badges, Felix the Cat figurines, Pennsylvania driver's licenses, Captain Midnight giveaways, Shirley Temple memorabilia and pink-porcelain pigs.

Any of these, or any of the myriad other collected items, could turn a profit for the person fortunate enough to secure sought-after objects cheaply and then doubly fortunate to locate an eager and well-heeled buyer. But such profits would be windfalls. By any reasonable definition, an investment ought to be repeatable; so this article will confine itself to collector pursuitsin which, all question of profit aside, investments can be made consistently. Even ruling out Felix the Cat figurines and the pink porkers, we are still confronted with a vast and intimidating junk heap. Convenience dictates the division of the universe of collector investments into five arbitrary and certainly arguable categories, each characterized by a large international collector following, a well-dispersed and generally competitive network of dealers and auction houses, and annual sales figures amounting to many millions of dollars. In our categorization, antiques include not only furniture but also decorative or dinner-table silver, porcelain and utilitarian objects of all description, as long as they are over 100 years old. Art includes paintings, sculpture, drawings, engravings, prints and anything else produced by artists for the enjoyment of others--a market, incidentally, wherein annual sales exceed abillion dollars world-wide. Literary material consists of books, autographs, letters and manuscripts. Stamps and coins, are just that. The rest comprises vintage autos, cultural and ethnic artifacts, firearms, paper-weights and all the other seriously collected items, whether objects of art or objects of utility, that don't fit the previous categories but, taken together, involve tens of thousands of collectors and annual sales of staggering amounts. We will discuss each of these categories in some detail and then examine ways the would-be collector-investor--assuming he's not intimidated by the many pitfalls involved--might go about assembling a collection, for fun as well as for profit. But before we can discuss the prospective rewards, which are problematical at best, we must consider the risks, which are very real.

Journalistic exaggerations, epitomized by the Forbes report, are just one difficulty confronting the would-be collector-investor. To the outsider, especially if he believes his newspaper, collector's items might seem a delightful and painless way to make money. Not only are the profits gratifying but, in the interim, while they are abuilding, there's the intangible but significant thrill of possession. You buy a Rembrandt etching for $600, hang it in your library for a few years, then sell it for $1500 and buy two more. What could be easier? Well, as it turns out, many things are easier--flying an unrestored Fokker D-VII through the hand-forged eye of a Colonial cobbler's needle, for instance. The absence of accurate, factual reportage would be enough to deter most investors from buying stocks or other paper securities, but in the case of the collector investments, this is just one of half a dozen difficulties. Hard buy and sell prices, for instance, of the sort investors can find daily for stocks, bonds, commodities or mutual funds are usually lacking. When they can be found, examination often proves them deceptive or meaningless. Worse, the market for many collector's items is as weak and as thin as last night's drinks. To sell a high-priced art object, an investor often waits many months to get it included in a decently cataloged auction sale. The alternative is to take a beating in a quick transaction with a dealer. Except for the buyer at auction, commissions are high. Indeed, the investor in securities or real estate, accustomed to paying commissions of from one to perhaps seven percent, could easily regard the prevailing 15--20 percent auctioneer's commission as prohibitively high. Transactions with private dealers, whether purchases or sales, involve markups that make even this look low. Add the undeniable need for expertise, in an area where experts rarely agree, and you have an investment medium that, despite all the glamor, can hardly be regarded as an easy way to make a killing. In fact, taken as a group, the collector investments are a fine way to lose money. Given great good luck, uncommon prescience or a sublime combination of both, profit, even enormous profit, is always possible. But it is nowhere nearly as commonplace as ecstatic journalists would lead the novice to believe and it is certainly not as easy as collectors and dealers would indicate.

The journalistic shortcomings are most easily explained by analogy: For centuries, a wives' tale held that porpoises push drowning men to safety. In several documented cases, this actually happened. But recently, cetologists discovered that porpoises just like to push things--life jackets, logs, anything that floats--and they push without regard to destination. For every drowning man nudged to safety, half a dozen were surely pushed off the continental shelf. Only the survivors returned to tell, and therein lies the difference. We read about the Renoir, purchased for peanuts in the 1920s and recently sold for seven figures, because that is news. But we don't read about the other 19th Century "masters"--Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, for instance, or Adolphe William Bouguereau, or Jules Lefebvre, or Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, or Sir Edwin Landseer--all of whose paintings once commanded six-figure prices in turn-of-the-century dollars but now sell for a few thousand or a few hundred. Even among living artists, one can find examples such as Bernard Buffet, the now-middle-aged boy (continued on page 238)Collecting(continued from page 156) wonder whose stark lines fired the imagination of a generation of interior decorators and whose works fetched $10,000 or more in the early 1960s. Of the ten Buffet canvases auctioned in 1969, seven sold for under $2500 and only one even approached five figures. We rarely read about things like this, because somehow they are not news. Surely, it's a commentary on contemporary capitalism to observe that investments generally, and collector investments specifically, are the last area of human endeavor where the good news gets all the publicity and the bad news languishes in neglect.

Imagine yourself a newspaper reporter assigned to write something on the investment potential of, say, rare books. You know more about bourbon than you do about books, so you do the obvious: You go through the microfilm files of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and locate a few reports, invariably about record-setting sales. Then you look up a rare-book dealer or two in the Manhattan Yellow Pages. (Most dealers in rare anything have their main galleries in New York or London and possibly a branch in Houston or Los Angeles.) When you reach a dealer, you are greeted with a telephonic orgy: "Best investment in the world...doubling every three years.... Nobody's buying stocks anymore....We're all getting rich." If you're an especially ambitious reporter, you might call a few big-time collectors--and hear the samespiel. Certainly, you have a consensus, and the consensus makes colorful copy. Better: It comes from the experts, so who can deny it?

Of course, no one can deny it. No one else knows anything about it. But, unhappily, the experts are the least objective sources imaginable. The Wall Street comparison would have an investment analyst assessing a company's stock-market potential solely by talking with executives of the firm and its major stockholders. Of course they think it's good. Their whole lives are tiedup in it. A rare-object dealer is rather like a grocer. He doesn't care which way prices are heading, as long as he has customers. His profit comes not from inventory appreciation (after all, rising prices mean he'll have to pay more to restock) but from the markup on each item he sells. The more goods he can move, the more profit he can make. If an investment rationale brings additional customers into the store--particularly new customers--then he will certainly try to create an investment rationale. This is not to imply that dealers are venal, just that they are human.

Collectors are the worst offenders of all, and understandably so. They are probably the mostmisunderstood minority group on God's earth. Like acidheads and homosexuals, they live in a hostile and intolerant world and their personalities can unfold only in communion with their own kind. Thus the incredible proliferation of collector magazines, collector societies and collector correspondence clubs. (As an example, there's a club--and a quarterly magazine--for people who collect books about stamp collecting.) Fate forces the typical collector to spend most of his life in the company of noncollectors. In a moment of weakness, he might try to explain to outsiders the ineffable joy he derives from plunking gold coins into Plexiglas holders; from lovingly contemplating the cream bindings of his French first editions, whose uncut pages can never be read; or from caressing the silky-smooth and somehow sexual hemispheres that make up his collection of Clichy paperweights. But such explanations are rarely understood. The listener nods wanly and tries to change the subject. Depending on the seriousness of the collector's commitment, the outsider will regard him as a harmless and doddering eccentric or as a highly advanced case of galloping anal fixation.

Reluctantly, the collector turns to the investment rationale: "This is my paperweight collection; I get a charge out of it--also, it appreciates 30 percent a year." Here is an explanation with which noncollectors can identify. Eccentricity becomes shrewdness, madness assumes a method. Blowing half one's pay check on an old campaign button suddenly becomes justifiable, even in the wife's eyes, because the proceeds from that very button will someday cover a year of little Arthur's college. Of course, it seldom works out that way. When he reaches college, poorArthur will find himself working weekends in a head shop, because Dad is not going to liquidatea lifetime's accumulation of Republican-primary campaign buttons just to subsidize his son's radicalization. Dad will die with his collection intact. Heirs will fall all over themselves in their haste to sell it, only to discover that it's worth a good bit less than it cost. The heirswill blame the dealers, the auctioneers or even the collector fraternity itself; but, in truth, the blame is theirs alone. They--the noncollectors--by their callous unwillingness to understand the collector mentality, forced a sensitive soul to resort to hypocrisy just so they'd leave him alone.

Literally, the collector mentality extends beyond the grave. Despite the enormous tax advantages that accrue from bequeathing a profitable collection to a public or semipublic institution, many serious collectors insist in their wills that their holdings be auctioned off or otherwise privately dispersed. The explanation, when there is one, is that the deceased owner wants other collectors, perhaps collectors yet unborn, to share the joy that he has known. Thus, the last will and testament of the late Frank Hogan, an important collector of autographed letters: "I do not deem it fitting that these friends of many happy hours should repose in unloved and soulless captivity. Rather, I would send them out into the world again, to be the intimate of others whose loving hands and understanding hearts will fill the place left vacant by my passing."

Reflection will reveal how hypocritical the investment rationale actually is in the eyes of a serious collector. Above all, he doesn't want the things he collects to increase in price. That would mean he could add fewer and fewer items to his collection; his happy hours would be proportionately less friendly. The collector's interest, in fact, is precisely the opposite of the investor's, which is the main reason collector's items are so difficult to approach from an investment standpoint. The very phrase collector-investor is schizophrenic. The investor wants steady, heady appreciation. The collector wants prices that are both stable and low and he will do everything in his power to keep them that way. Moreover, his powers are not small. His instinct for his own kind will bring him in touch with others who share his particular interests and he and his fellows will make sure they are not bidding against one another when a desirable item appears at public auction. If an official catalog or magazine speaks for his pursuit, he and his correspondents probably write it--and set the prices, if possible. His group will know all the major dealers in the field; and if any one dealer begins to raise prices too exorbitantly, he will soon find himself without customers. And if a well-heeled and unknowledgeable newcomer enters the lists in hopes of making a quick killing, the collectors can do him in, much in the same way stock-market insiders gun down amateurs trying to poach on their preserves.

Most outsiders think that every collector's goal is to assemble a complete collection--of whatever it might be. Here, too, nothing could be less true. A complete collection is a collector's nightmare, because nothing more can be added to it. It is no longer a collection but a museum piece. Most collectors instinctively avoid areas where completion is even faintly possible. If wealth and longevity should conspire to bring a collection dangerously close to the definitive, the collector will marshal every energy to postpone such a disaster. Instead of desiring simply one of everything, he will seek the finest examples extant or delve deeper into the scholarly arcana of the field in search of correlative or corroborative material or other peripheral (but highly collectable) trivia. And if all this fails, he will simply lose interest and start accumulating something else.

That prince of contemporary collectors, Josiah K. Lilly of Indianapolis, heir to the vast Lilly drug fortune and free all his life to indulge his even vaster collector idiosyncrasies, wasonce offered, by one of his rare-book scouts, all the first editions of the works of every author who had ever won a Nobel Prize in literature. The price was right and the books were in magnificent condition, but Lilly rejected the offer. "A splendid idea," he reportedly told his bookman, "but I'd rather do it myself." Whether Lilly accomplished this Nobel feat is not known. He died a few years ago and left, among many other effects, the finest collections of U.S. gold coins, unused U.S. postage stamps and lead toy soldiers that had ever been assembled. The coin collection, virtually complete, went to the Smithsonian, in a special tax transaction whose details have never been revealed. The toy soldiers are still in private hands. The stamps were dispersed at auction and realized over $4,000,000.

Lilly's stamp collection sold for much more than he spent to put it together. In other words, he made a profit, albeit a posthumous one. In fact, most great collections turn out to be profitable, and for good reason. They are assembled by fastidious, knowledgeable people who are blessed with patience, discernment and (usually) wealth. Those so singularly endowed will invariably put together a collection that is desired by other collectors when it is dispersed. But the outsider must realize that such a collection is assembled for love, not for money. Virtually every profitable collection one can name, in any area, was not mounted with an investment end in view. And almost every collection put together solely in the hope of profit has proved unprofitable, usually because the accumulator lacked the intangible elements of knowledge, patience, acquisitiveness, and even love, that seem to characterize the great collector. Trying to assemble a worthwhile showing of things you're not interested in is like aspiring to be a master chef without having a taste for fine food. Impossible.

• • •

Properly forewarned, the reader is invited to enter the thicket. Literary materials are a good departure point, being a subject few people know anything about. The collecting of literary rarities--manuscripts, autographs, letters and, especially, books--has historically been a preoccupation of people of literary taste. Now, however, well-heeled university libraries are also murking up the market, and they sometimes run prices up to dazzling levels, on the theory that Virginia Woolf' s letters to her husband, for example, should be worth more to unborn generations of Ph.D. candidates than to Dallas computer-software magnates. Fortune recently estimated that 70 percent of rare-book sales are now made to universities and museums, compared with 40 percent in the early Fifties. This bodes well for investors, of course, because it means the available supply of desirable material is diminishing, so that what remains will command higher and higher prices. (To a greater or lesser extent, institutional buying puts similar pressure on all the other collector's items.) According to one index, collectable books generally increased in value by a factor of five during the 1960s.

First editions have always been treasured by book collectors, but very old works (just about anything before 1700 or so) and early editions of very great writers (Shakespeare, for an obvious example) are also valued. As a general rule--one that also holds true for most other collector pursuits--value is determined by demand, rarity, condition, historical importance and beauty, roughly in that order. Rare-book prices fluctuate wildly and, despite popular impression, they can go down as well as up. John Galsworthy, for example, an author who was lionizedseveral generations ago, is now less highly regarded--the BBC's The Forsyte Saga notwithstanding. A so-so first edition of his little-known The Island Pharisees sold for $1375 in 1930; a much better copy, inscribed by the author, went for $60 a generation later.

Despite the academic pretenses, the last thing a collector would do with a rare book is read it, because that would surely diminish its value. In all the collector areas, condition crucially affects price. First editions of Boswell's Johnson (1791) sold at auction in 1968 for $400 or so and today bring perhaps $500. But in 1969, a copy in its original binding, with pages uncut (obviously never read), sold at auction in London for over $3000. This was the finest copy extant, as the price tag--about six times the then-current market--clearly showed.

Scholarly research can also affect values. Shortly after Indiana University published a definitive bibliography of the prolific writings of Daniel Defoe, bookworms began to note increases in the prices of his works. The Indiana scholarship, in the words of one expert, "by removing the element of doubt, pushed the value of books in the accepted canon sharply higher." After all, collectors can't know what they are buying until someone has told them.

Lavishly illustrated old books seem to command especially high prices, often because they can be split up individually and sold as art. Connoisseur magazine estimates that 70 percent of the old atlases sold at auction are transmogrified into interior decoration. William Blake's illustrations for the Book of Job (1825), which sold for $1725 in 1966, last year brought $4200--at a London print sale. A copy of Balzac's Chefs d'Oeuvre Inconnus, for which the illustrator happened to be Pablo Picasso, sold in 1966 for $1820 and fetched $6000 last year.

Modern books form a subcategory of their own. Besides first editions, this includes finely printed works, usually in limited, numbered and signed editions, produced solely to gratify bibliophilic desires, which seem insatiable. The fad for collector editions came of age in the Twenties, died abruptly with the Depression and came back strong in the Sixties. Today, more than a dozen publishers make a handsome living producing little else. Despite what seems to be a rigged market, such books, especially the earlier illustrated ones, have fared quite well in the past decade, increasing in value by a factor of five or so.

Among collected modern books originally sold for reading, rather than for collecting, first editions predominate and their value generally varies with the stature of the author and the size of the edition. Sudden changes in his literary status can trigger equally sudden reactions in the collector value of his works. Books that become fad hits years after publication--such as Lord of the Flies and The Sot-Weed Factor--are sought in first editions by collectors who speculate that the authors' new importance might endure. The film Lawrence of Arabia caused the value of first editions of T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) to double; this, by the way, is a scarce item, worth (in fine condition) perhaps $3000. Similarly, an author's death can rekindle collector interest; this happened with Hemingway and Faulkner and, more recently, with John O'Hara, whose Appointment in Samarra (his first book) sold for seven dollars in the early Sixties and now commands $75.

In all the collector investments, newcomers are well advised to confine themselves to as narrow a specialty as possible--preferably, a subject that already appeals to them. A novice bibliophile with a gourmet bent, for instance, might want to begin assembling a first-class collection of cookbooks. He will soon find that these have suffered ravages similar to children's literature, with older works especially difficult to locate in pristine condition. Historical figures from Lufcadio Hearn to Toulouse-Lautrec have written cookbooks, and a showing of these would surely be a treasure.

Magazines are a risky speculation. They are produced in quantity and vintage copies invariably boast more sellers than buyers. The first issue of Playboy, for example, is generally thought to be quite valuable, because dealers have asked up to $125 per copy. But the same dealers will rarely offer more than $25 to a potential seller. For the record, only the first 14 issues of Playboy have any special collector value, with retail offerings ranging between $100 (volume one, number one) and $12 (volume two, number two). Old movie magazines, especially those involving Shirley Temple, around whom a fanatic collector cult has swirled for decades, sell for between $2 and $100. Perhaps the most widely collected of all magazines, National Geographic, has no speculative appeal whatever, because the crafty National Geographic Society saved all its plates and reprints old issues.

Early comic books, once thought to contribute to the delinquency of minors, wound up contributing to the enrichment of the few aficionados who saved them. Comic-book collecting came of age in the Sixties, gathering scholarly magazines, hard-cash buyers, national associations and many of the other trappings that characterize a serious and enduring collector pursuit. Last year, when comics collectors convened at the Statler-Hilton in New York, over 2000 of the faithful showed up--a mammoth turnout for any such confab. Typically, first editions are the most valuable. The first Superman (1938) now sells for $300; Famous Funnies (1934) also brings $300; and Batman (1940), $150. All these, recall, originally sold for a dime and all could have been bought for under $50 five years ago. Some nonfirst issues, sought bycollectors to complete full runs, are also valuable. The 44th Terry and the Pirates, forexample, sells for $140 and the 328th Donald Duck brings six. dollars. For those who think they might have a fortune tucked away in their parents' attic, Brooklyn's Grand Book Center publishes a catalog offering 15,000 comics at prices between 50 cents and $150.

The collecting of signatures, letters and other historical material was once confined to history buffs but now seems to have gathered an investor following as well, perhaps because of pronouncements such as that of New York autograph dealer Charles Hamilton (he sold the Jacqueline Kennedy letters), who recently told a Business Week reporter that "prices for fine American autographs have increased 25 times since 1960." This is true only if you define a fine American autograph as one that increases in value 25 times in a decade. Most signatures, while they have fared respectably, haven't done nearly so well.

Autograph prices depend on the fame of the signer-writer, the scarcity of his signature and the content of the letter, if any. All historical signatures have collector value, but if the signature is of a famous personality on an interesting letter, the price increases enormously. Notoriously scarce are signatures of Haydn, Poe (himself an autograph collector) and Shakespeare; only six Shakespeare signatures are known, spelled in varying ways.

Most popular with American collectors today are Revolutionary War material and Presidential signatures. Many speculators, not only in autographs but also in stamps, prints and other collector areas, are anticipating a run-up in Revolution-related material to coincide with the celebrations planned for 1976--the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, so intimately associated with the Declaration, seems especially favored. A similar boomlet occurred in Civil War memorabilia on its centenary ten years ago but failed to reach the proportions that greedy speculators predicted.

Forgeries plague all collector investments, but they are most common in the world of autographs and letters. A prolific Frenchman of the last century supplied a prominent collector with no fewer than 20,000 fakes in eight short years, including letters (all in French) from Judas Iscariot, Alexander the Great, Aristotle, Cleopatra and Lazarus (this one dated two years after his resurrection). Contemporary collectors are somewhat more sophisticated, but the possibility of clever forgery still exists. Most high-priced autographs, as well as works of art, will carry not only a dealer's guarantee but also a provenance--a pedigree of sorts--tracing the collections in which it has previously reposed or the circumstances under which it was discovered.

• • •

Art is usually regarded as the premier collector investment and, for the past 20 years or so, has certainly lived up to its billing. Prior to 1950, art prices (and those of many other collector investments) closely followed stock prices. A privately compiled index charting the price movement of the works of 125 internationally known artists, starting at a base of 100 in 1925, peaked at 165 in 1929, had fallen to 50 by 1933, did not reach 100 again until 1945 and stood at 150 in 1950. Anyone vaguely familiar with stock prices will recognize the close similarity to the meanderings of the Dow-Jones Industrial Average.

Between 1950 and 1960, the art index increased by a factor of six, while the Dow-Jones industrials, during the greatest bull market in American history, managed only to triple. Between 1960 and 1970, the art index quadrupled, while the D. J. I. A. just lay there. Of course, any art-price index is misleading. While the stock, averages reflect huge sales of identical items exchanged every weekday of the year, a representative work of art may come on to the market only once or twice in a lifetime. Better pieces have the habit of leaving the market altogether, while, to a lesser extent, new discoveries and new favorites take their place. As a result, any generalization about art-price trends should be taken with a whole shakerful of salt.

The most serious and widely regarded charting of art-price movements is an ongoing collaboration between Sotheby's (Suth-er-bees), the huge London auction gallery, and the London Times, whose coverage of art-world developments is without equal. (A few years ago, Sotheby's acquired New York's vast Parke-Bernet (Ber-net) auction galleries, creating an international cartel that is the IBM of the art-auction world.) The Times-Sotheby indexes, as they are called, attempt to plot price movements in dozens of art categories. The compilers rightly stress that precision is impossible and that the figures should be taken only "as rough orders of magnitude," a caveat that often gets lost in journalistic transcription, possibly because the public is so hungry for digestible information about art profits and possibly, too, because the indexes are expressed in specific numerical quantities that belie the compilers' warnings. The indexes have been in existence for only three years, so they have been extrapolated back into the past, conveniently depicting the post-1950 period during which prices shot up so dramatically. (A stock-market analog would be to decide in 1971 to concoct a growth-stock index for the past 20 years and to select, as components of the index, those stocks that had grown the most; the result would be wonderful to behold, but its relevance to the course of stocks in general would be considerably less striking.)

Nonetheless, the Times-Sotheby indexes are a beginning and, since they are all we have, we must make the best of them. They are the source of some of the price generalizations made earlier and will be cited frequently in the paragraphs that follow. But readers must bear in mind that they are a far-from-perfect measuring rod. Theirs after-the-fact nature, plus their overrepresentation of museum-quality masterpieces (in the art world, a masterpiece tends to be anything that sells for six figures or more), means that they might overstate the performance of run-of-the-gallery works by a factor of three or five. Even granting such overstatement, the figures are impressive. The Times-Sotheby indexes show that since 1951 (base year for all the figures), French impressionist paintings have increased in value 17 times, 20th Century paintings 21 times, old-master drawings 22 times, British paintings 9 1/2 times, Italian paintings 7 1/2 times and old-master paintings 7 times. (This last figure will surely console the man who purchased Bassano's Flight into Egypt for $645,000 in 1960--and sold it in 1970 for $240,000.)

American works are not indexed, since not too many get to London; they are mostly bought by U.S. collectors. However, American works have risen in value tremendously in the past decade, perhaps by a factor of ten or so. Most knowledgeable observers think this is just the beginning. A significant sale of American paintings, held at Parke-Bernet in March 1969, seemed to herald a new era of collector interest and high bidding. American taste for art had traditionally followed European fashion ("aped it" might be more precise), but recently, American collectors have become both more nationalistic in their taste and more confident in their judgment. Today, in fact, Americans seem on the verge of becoming leaders rather than followers in the art world. And regardless of the soundness of their instincts, they certainly have the money, as current prices confirm.

Paintings by American "old masters"--John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart and Benjamin West, for example--actually declined in value during the early Fifties. But works that then sold for a few thousand dollars now command six figures. (American prairie painters, notably Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, have fared almost as well.) West's Portrait of John Eardley-Wilmot, which recently emerged from the hands of the subject's descendants, knocked down $86,400--then an auction record for an American master--when sold at Sotheby's in late 1970. An interesting feature of this canvas, which would have sold for perhaps $2500 15 years ago, is that its background shows a lost painting by West, this one an allegory of peace, included in the Eardley-Wilmot portrait because its subject was associated with the treaty that finally settled the American Revolution. The lost canvas, like so many other masterpieces of American art, probably reposes, unappreciated and neglected, in somebody's attic. American art, being such a newly fashionable field, still oilers opportunities for significant discovery.

The Eardley-Wilmot price record lasted all of one month. The current auction record for an American work, a figure that might be shattered by the time these words are read, is $210,000, paid by an anonymous collector for Thomas Eakins' Cowboys in the Badlands in December 1970 at Parke-Bernet. Eakins may well be the greatest artist America has ever produced, butthis is still a startling realization for a painting that is far from a masteqiiece. Indeed, what most commends Cowboys is its Western subject matter--now very much in vogue--and the fact that it vaguely resembles a Remington. Underbidder on the Eakins canvas was the appropriately yclept Armand Hammer, board chairman of Occidental Petroleum Company. At the samesale, Hammer paid $205,000 for a Stuart portrait of George Washington--similar to the faceon our dollar bill--and, once again, a work that hardly qualifies as the greatest thing anAmerican artist ever put on canvas. Much of Stuart's livelihood came from knocking out portraits of Washington for post-Revolutionary patriots; he actually produced scores of them, all strikingly alike.

When each of these canvases was sold, collectors in the bidding audience burst into applause--presumably their way of saying that if these paintings are worth six figures, many other American works are suddenly worth much, much more. After the sale, Lawrence Fleischman, director of New York's Kennedy Galleries, opined that before too long, a made-in-America canvas would fetch over $1,000,000. Eakins' The Gross Clinic, for instance, a grisly insight into 19th Century surgical procedures that now reposes in Philadelphia's Jefferson Medical College, would surely exceed the $1,000,000 mark if auctioned today.

Many art lovers, whether collectors, speculators or both, have turned to print collecting. A print can be any reproduced picture, but the collector market is largely confined to those that are made under the artist's supervision. Many come signed, either by hand or on the plate, an embellishment that adds 25-100 percent to the value. Print dealers seem an especially cliquish group and, by and large, they caution against buying prints for investment--despite the fact that prices have increased dramatically in recent years. Abraham Lublin, now head of a huge print distributorship, recalls that in 1949, when he started selling graphics in the 42nd Street subway station, "You couldn't wrap up a loaf of bread in them and give them away." Today, the Leonard Baskin woodcuts Lublin jokes about command $250 each and his firm's annual sales exceed $3,000,000.

But prints have their problems, too. Those of James McNeill Whistler, of Mother fame, may never regain the popularity (and the price tags) they commanded 50 years ago. Prints are also easier to forge than originals; and unless the novice collector has done his homework, he'll have no idea how many of a particular print exist. At Parke-Bernet, a Renoir went for just $100--because it was from an edition of 1000. If it were scarcer, of course, it would be much more valuable. Condition is also a factor. The Kennedy Galleries recently showed two Rembrandt prints from the same plate. An early impression, pulled before the soft copper wore down, was offered at $15,000. The other, a much later (and therefore fuzzier) impression, was $4500.

• • •

Fine antique furniture is art in its own right. Great furniture shows superb workmanship, the artist's eye for form and the craftsman's attention to detail. The French pieces from the golden age of the Kings Louis generally command the highest prices. In that era, the development of the medieval guild system, the appearance of exotic woods from newly exploited colonies and the emergence of a taste-conscious and affluent (not to say decadent) aristocracy combined to produce works of furniture--virtually all of them commissioned--that were regarded almost from the day they were made as the quintessential masterpieces of the cabinetmaker's art. (Of course, the 18th Century produced a lot of junk furniture as well; the fine pieces came only from those who had both taste and wealth, and even when new, they were far from cheap.) During the French Revolution, when the sans-culottes were burning every vestige of aristocracy that didn't conveniently fit the guillotine, the furnishings from Versailles were carefully set aside, eventually to be auctioned off by the state in what was surely the most dazzling furniture sale in all history. The current record furniture item, incidentally, is a Louis XVI marquetry commode from the Versailles sale, which sold for $176,400 in London in 1964.

According to the Times-Sotheby indexes, fine French furniture increased in value by afactor of five over the past 20 years, though it has managed only to double in the past decade and has recently retreated somewhat. Other 18th Century furniture has done better, increasing sixfold during the 20-year period. English and American pieces have fared less well, increasing by factors of three and three-and-a-half, respectively, though this lagging start may promise greater increases to come.

American collectors would probably do well to confine themselves to the British and American pieces already available here. Fine American works--not cobbler's benches nor thrift-shop bric-a-brac but the quality walnut or mahogany sideboards and highboys crafted in 18th Century Philadelphia or Newport--increase in value every year. Many of these are as rare--and almost as expensive--as their French counterparts. A Goddard-design as kneehole desk recently sold for $104,000 in Philadelphia, an American record. Not long ago, a Queen Anne armchair from a famous Philadelphia cabinetmaker brought $27,500, at a time when the British pieces from which it had been copied sold for only a few thousand and similar American pieces, not from Philadelphia, could be had for a few hundred. Many observers note that American Queen Anne pieces are now about as highly priced as their French counterparts and thus may not go much higher. Experts at Parke-Bernet see increasing interest in American Federal-and Empire-period furniture, styles that taste makers have so far neglected. Here, at least, the price is right and good pieces can sometimes be found for sums comparable with the cost of contemporary equivalents.

Among dinnerware and similar items, silver pieces are the most widely collected, because they are both durable (unlike glass and porcelain) and useful. Despite a recent speculative sell-off, British silver ranks premier. Since the days of Chaucer, British gold- and silversmiths have marked their work with a special code (a hallmark) that not only dates each piece but also identifies the maker, thus assuring authenticity and making hallmarked objects more collectable. Eighteenth Century pieces are the most popular, because earlier works are few and derivative and later ones impossibly ornate. The 18th Century works were produced in uncomplicated shapes that appeal nowadays and the number of styles is limited. Many examples of each given type survive, which allows collector-investors to follow price changes. For the past 20 years, the Times-Sotheby indexes show 18th Century English silver up by a factor of eight-and-a-half, off considerably from the peak two years ago but a good showing nonetheless.

American silver, such as it is, is a less desirable investment, partly because it finds a market only on these shores. The sine qua non of any American silver collection is a pieceby Paul Revere. While no more accomplished than many other Colonial silversmiths (most of whom were self-taught and none of whom produced works anywhere approaching Continental quality), Revere has had, in the venerable personage of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the world's most enduring press agent. A silver porringer (easy to mistake for an ashtray) bearing Revere's rectangularlogotype would fetch $12,000 today; an identical porringer, just as old and just as well made but Jacking the Revere emblem, would bring perhaps $150. Needless to say, such disparities offerrich opportunity for forgery. Even experts can be confused, which is why so many Revere pieces carry provenance. Many American silver collectors have turned to pewter. American 18th Century pewter is probably as good an investment as silver. It's also priced lower and (many would say)more attractive.

• • •

Coin prices are just now recovering from the aftereffects of an enormous speculative bender that almost destroyed the coin world in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Back then, every other American was sifting through pocket change, looking for scarce dates and mint marks. Speculators were "reinvesting" profits even before they were made. Fly-by-night dealers, linked to nationwide teletype "coin exchanges," bought and sold coins by the roll, by the bagful, even by the carload, seemingly unaware that if a coin exists in carload lots, it can never become rare or enduringly valuable.

The Great Koin Kraze (as serious numismatists call it) collapsed under its own weight when ahandful of big-time speculators made the tactical error of trying to cash their paper profits. Novice collector-investors shortly there-after received what numismatists regarded as their very just deserts, and coin collecting returned to the engrossing (and sometimes profitable) hobbythat it is.

Serious collectors avoid pocket coins; this is not the stuff of which an interesting collection is made. Coins that have seen circulation are usually scuffed and scarred, thus less desirable. Collectors prefer coins "uncirculated" or even "brilliant uncirculated" (still bearing original mint luster), a preoccupation that obviously has its counterparts in other collector fields.

The premier item among U.S. coin collectors is the 1804 silver dollar, a piece that has provoked much controversy among coin students, few of whom can agree on why only four examples should exist. One of them sold in 1954 for $8000, resold in 1960 for $28,000 and sold again in 1963for $36,000. Last year, another one--from the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society, originally from the collection of President John Adams--pulled in a world-record $77,500 at Stack's, New York's biggest coin dealership. The impressive gains scored by this rare item are extreme, but they do suggest something of the uninterrupted price advances that have accrued in genuinely rare coins.

From an investment point of view, the interesting thing about coins and stamps is that in most instances, they are not unique. Depending on condition, each variety of stamp or coin has its own value range. When one item fetches such and such a price, a collector will be able to estimate the worth of whatever similar ones he owns. In fact, sales are frequent enough to enable dealers and independent observers to publish price catalogs similar to a used-car dealer's Blue Book.

A long run of these catalogs arms the collector-investor with unique insights into the price performance of stamps and coins. But unfortunately, until very recently, this information was never fully exploited. Now, thanks to a new computer study, we can make hard-fact observations about postage-stamp price trends over the past 20 years (and, by extension, about price trends in other collector areas). Using catalog valuations (which don't reflect actual retail prices but do reflect long-term price changes), an organization called Mardis Industries International has studied 2117 collectable U.S. postage stamps--all in unused condition, which investors generally prefer. This total includes virtually every U.S. stamp, and many subvarieties, issued up to 1940.

The result, alas, gives the lie to all the ecstatic reportage about rare-stamp prices increasing 10 to 25 percent a year. It also makes one wonder how the other collector investments would stand up under similar high-intensity analysis. The 2117 stamps studied, over the 21-year period from 1949 to 1969, increased, on the average, at a rate of five percent per annum, compounded.

Those who invest in postage stamps will quickly counter that the five-percent performance figure is meaningless, since it includes the dawdling performance of loads of common stamps that only fools (and collectors) would buy. True, except that the rare stamps--the very ones that big-time investors favor--haven't done significantly better. The upside-down airmail stamp, for example, one of the most popular stamps among well-to-do philatelic investors and an item that garners headlines every time a copy sells for $30,000 or $40,000, increased at a rate of 8.4 percent. Not a bad return, to be sure, but a far cry from the 25 percent we have been reading about.

As it turns out, of all 2117 stamps in the Mardis study, only one returned over 15 percent. This particular item, a coil stamp (for vending machines) issued in 1929 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the light bulb, increased at a rate of 16.2 percent. But it isn't a rare stamp. Almost 134,000,000 were issued and they now retail for four dollars each. Any investor looking to make significant profits here would have been forced to hold more copies than the market could bear.

Worse, of the entire list, only 39 (counting the light-bulb item) returned ten percent or more, and more than half of these were what collectors call Government reprints--sort of nonstamps, many of them not even valid for postage, printed for souvenir seekers at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. Altogether, only a few thousand of these have survived; they are so scarce as to be all but unobtainable. In a given auction year, no more than half a dozen of each will come up for sale. And of the rest of the ten-percent performers, most were so common, and priced so low, that anyone, who bought them in the quantities needed to justify the investment could never unload without destroying the market. One of the top 19th Century items, for instance, was the two-cent Columbian commemorative, well known to anyone who had a childhood stamp collection. A staggering one and a half billion copies of this stamp were printed and unused examples now retail for around two dollars, up from 40 cents two decades ago.

Even an experienced collector of U.S. stamps, poring over the list of top performers, would be hard pressed to explain why the winners won and the losers lost. And if after-the-fact explanations could be drawn, no one in his right mind would have believed them 20 years ago, which is when investors should have bought these stamps. We might soon read a news item about an Ohio grandmother who purchased 1000 copies of the light-bulb stamp 40 years ago at the post-office price of $20 and who recently sold them for $4000. But if we do, we must resist the temptation to think she had some unique insight into the stamp-investment world. She was not prescient, just very lucky. And so, too, one must reluctantly conclude, are most of the other "investors" whomake windfall fortunes in the collector world.

• • •

There are many more collector pursuits than can be discussed in a single article or even in a full-length book. We have concentrated on the major ones, paying special attention to fields where investment profit, if far from certain, is at least possible. Before we turn to investment techniques, here, in the interest of completeness, are capsule appraisals of a random selection of similar but smaller fields.

Oriental rugs, at least those made before 1850 or so, have become an increasingly popular investment, though they have a long way to go to reattain the prices that prevailed in the Twenties. Most of the magnificent royal carpets of yesteryear are already in museums' (such as the one that recently slipped out of the Rothschild collection--for $600,000), so collectors content themselves with the distinctive varieties produced by different Middle Eastern regions and tribesmen. Strangely, the U.S. is the primary source of these rugs, which were imported by the boatload around the turn of the century to decorate tycoons' mansions. In comparison with other art areas, price increases have been modest so far (a total of $200,000 for 21 carpets in a Sotheby's sale in late 1969 was reckoned astonishing by a rug-trade journal) and collectors feel that prices have nowhere to go but up. Typically, smaller carpets--more portable and more hangable--command proportionately higher prices.

Automobiles: Playboy Contributing Editor Ken W. Purely, himself a collector, wrote on this subject with such love and authority (Classic-Car Collecting, Playboy, May 1969) that little can be added. The record auction price for an automobile is currently $59,000 (sold by Parke-Bernet, of course) for a 1936 58SC Bugatti; but, as is true in most collector areas, private sales have surely exceeded the auction record. One classic-car buff has rejected offers of $65,000 and $100,000 for his two Duesenbergs.

Barbed wire--don't laugh--is a recent collector pursuit that supposedly commands 10,000 devotees, mostly in Texas and points west. As is typical in new collector fields, the hobby was given a big boost by the publication of a semischolarly book, The Wire That Fenced the West, by Henry D. McCallum. Eighteen-inch barbed-wire strands have reportedly changed hands for as much as $140 each; but at this point, barbed-wire collecting is still in the "I'll give you two of these for one of those" stage, which means that it can't yet command serious investor attention. (Stamp collecting, however, was at roughly the same point 100 years ago and many pioneer collections were subsequently worth fortunes.)

Old weapons have done well in recent years, though it's difficult to credit one widely publicized estimate that values increased 1000 percent in 1970 alone. The high prices that characterized one of the major weaponry sales last year (at London's Christie's in mid-1970) reflected not so much the market in general as the astonishing quality of the material offered. A matched set of two pistols and a ride (never fired, of course), with original case and equipment, from the Napoleonic master Nicolas-Noel Boutet, France's greatest gunsmith, garnered $103,320, more than double the previous record. Writing about this sale, Auction magazine commented that "the market for fine arms could not be stronger, having seen as rapid development over the last five years as any other field in the art world." (Auction, incidentally, while it still betrays its origins as a house organ for Parke-Bernet, is the best single source of information about happenings in the collector world. It's published monthly, for $12 a year, at 140 Cedar Street, New York, New York 10006.)

• • •

The myth that the collector investments are a source of quick profits for all who are involved in them doesn't die easily. In fact, it is part of what economist John Kenneth Galbraith calls the "conventional wisdom" of our time. All the same, for those who feel, lurking somewhere in their vitals, a nascent urge to collect, and who wouldn't be averse to the prospect, however remote, of making a little money while they're at it, five approaches seem available. A choice among them would be dictated by the collector-investor's personal make-up and by his bank roll.The five approaches, which will be discussed in turn, can be labeled conservative, speculative, expert, synergistic and utilitarian.

The conservative approach involves buying acknowledged value in the expectation of continuing appreciation. A contemporary linguistic tragedy is the fall from grace of the word conservative. Readers of all political persuasions should note that a conservative investment technique--one that uses the lessons of the past to make reasoned guesses about the future--must never be thought of as benighted, antisocial or unprofitable. In many investments, the conservative approach is the most profitable one. Too often, we tend to think that millionaires are conservative because they are rich, without ever considering the equally plausible converse: that they are rich because they are conservative. In the art world, the conservative approach would involve buying the ever-diminishing number of museum-quality pieces still on the market. These are the finest works of the most important artists throughout history. Today, major French impressionists and old masters are favored. Prices have been rising for generations and, barring disaster, these increases should continue. In other words, despite the high initial cost, a purchase at current levels is most likely to show a profit in the future. Rather like betting on a sure thing.

The other collector fields have their museum-piece equivalents. In the rare-book world, they're the incunabula (books printed during printing's infancy--the 15th Century), the early editions of the literary giants (Shakespeare's first folios, Dante's first editions) and the earliest American works (The Bay Psalm Book or most anything printed in Boston before 1700). In antique furniture, the old masters would be the magnificent pre-Revolutionary French pieces. In autographs, the treasured signatures of the historically great: Napoleon, Washington, Shakespeare. In silver, the great Georgian coffee and tea services. In stamps, the classic rarities of the 19th Century, often from faraway colonies of the British Empire; in coins, many of the scarce and lovely gold items, the great pieces of Greek and Roman antiquity and the rare "common" coins of the U.S.A., such as the 1804 silver dollar. Whoever invests in any of these classic collector treasures (when he can find them) can be certain he is not caught up in a passing fad. Old masters such as these bear the imprimatur of generations of collector approval. They are also backed by a long and steady history of price appreciation.

As with conservatively selected stocks or bonds, the old masters of the collector world hold up well in times of stress. In the past few years, the inflation that accompanied the Vietnam war turned more and more investors away from paper securities. Many of these newcomers, unwilling or unable to pay six-figure prices for major French impressionists (or their equivalent in other fields) settled for second or sometimes third best. The art world witnessed a colossal run up in prices of the works of minor impressionists. The speculative tidal wave in antique silver surged out of England and swept over both shores of the Atlantic. Even common western European postage stamps were bid up all out of proportion to their scarcity value. Inevitably, bust followed boom. Many items that had doubled, tripled or even quadrupled alter 1965 fell back almost as sharply in 1968 and 1969. But the museum-quality pieces in every field held their own or even increased. In the spring of 1970, as the stock market touched a ten-year low, Van Gogh's Le Cypres et l'Arbre en Fleurs fetched an unprecedented $1,300,000 and the penny-magenta postage stamp reached its record $280,000. Obviously, such old masters aren't cheap. Their gilt-edged investment security is out of reach of all but the wealthy, so the less-well-off will have to look elsewhere.

• • •

They might want to investigate the speculative approach. This technique involves buying relatively inexpensive items in hopes that they will become significantly more valuable. Given great timing or great good luck (or both), this can prove enormously profitable. But it's also highly risky and sure to produce many more disasters than successes. And, as we know, only the successes will be publicized. We read about Jasper Johns's Coal Hanger I--black-and-white lithographs that sold in 1960 (from an edition of 35) for $75 each and are today worth perhaps $4000 apiece. But we don't hear of the tens of thousands of other prints that also sold for $75 in 1960--and are today worth nothing at all. We read how Mickey Mouse watches increased in value 1250 percent in the past five years (while blue-chip stocks dropped 35 percent), but we don't read about all the other camp garbage that today could not find buyers at any price. Common seven-cent U.S. airmail stamps, of which almost 100,000,000 were issued 11 years ago, now sell for up to $25 a pair. But the vast preponderance of other U.S. stamps issued at the same time now sell, in quantity, for less than their face value. Anyone who bought 100 copies of each stamp at the post oflice in 1960 would have nice profits in his airmail but losses in everything else. Moreover, he might well have missed the airmail stamp. It was so common few people bothered to save any. That's why it became scarce.

With a carefully selected subject and enough cash to see a commitment through, the speculative approach offers the intriguing possibility of the collector's affecting the market himself. Cognoscenti of the art-object scene have noted the breath-taking price increases, in the past decade or so, of exquisitely crafted glass paperweights, most of which were produced in the 1840s. Auction recently described a "single Clichy convolvulus" (a certain sought-after paperweight type) that sold in 1953 for $216, was resold in 1965 for $1152 and resold again in 1968 for $6120. Such growth is typical of classic paperweights during this period, and the increase seems attributable in part to the robust collecting habits of one man--Arthur Rubloff, the multimillionaire Chicago real-estate developer. Rubloff now owns around 900 classic paperweights (out of a floating supply estimated between 20,000 and 30,000). This is a serious and thoughtfully constructed collection, probably the largest and finest ever assembled. (Even King Farouk, whose name still looms as large as the man himself in the annals of collecting, had only 300 paperweights.) Rubloff, incidentally, would strongly deny anything speculative about his entry into the paperweight world, and he would surely be correct. As is typical, his collection was mounted without thought of profit. In fact, Rubloff views his role in the great paperweight run-up with something close to distaste and insists that his collection will never come onto the market. Perhaps this is for the best. Rubloff's buying impetus is no longer supporting prices and they have dropped off somewhat.

Similarly, candid cameraman Allen Funt has sparked a minor revival in the paintings of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema--one of those artists, mentioned earlier, whose work commanded six-figure prices in the 19th Century and subsequently declined to virtually nothing. Alma-Tadema was not only knighted but apotheosized during the Victorian era. He produced historical canvases of flawless and soaring mediocrity, works that today evoke the memory of Late Show movies and Cecil B. DeMille. Funt, who has the money, is tickled by these paintings (Al ma-Tadema called them opuses) and has managed to pick up perhaps one tenth of the artist's total output--no mean feat. So Alma-Tademas, which once sold for tens of thousands, now sell for thousands instead of hundreds. But even in 1970, one of the artist's many didactic works, engagingly titled The Strangling of Galeswinthe at the Orders of Fredegonde, was knocked down for $96

While it's rewarding to get in at the ebb point in a new collector wave, the man who speculates in collector's items runs the constant risk of being caught in shiftingtides. Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup Can with Peeling Label, a battered vegetable-beef version of the supermarket standby he was selling for peanuts in the late Fifties, went for $60,000 at auction in 1970--then a record auction yield for the work of a living American artist. (It was recently broken by Roy Lichtenstein's Big Painting No. 6, which realized $75, 000.) Surely such canvases speak to the mindless materialism of mid-century America, and presumably they still fire whatever passes for imagination in the New York cocktail-and-communications set. But whether they will prove enduring works of art--or profitable investments--remains to be seen.

In fairness to pop-art fans, the Philistines said the same thing to Mrs. Potter Palmer, who, during the 1890s, was paying outrageous three- and sometimes four-figure sums for the innovative and impressionist works of a group of young Parisians. The first impressionist paintings she purchased--four Renoirs, for which she paid a total of $5000--are worth millions today, and her entire collection, the nucleus of the dazzling impressionist showing at the Art Institute of Chicago, represents a fortune almost beyond counting.

Such is the problem the speculative art buyer--or the speculative buyer of any of the collector investments--must confront. Taste and a good eye are the oft-cited prerequisites--but no one knows whose eye is good and whose taste enduring until after the fact. What's exalted in one generation is often ridiculed in the next and forgotten by the third; and yesterday's atrocity is tomorrow's masterpiece. In retrospect, nothing is easier than saying what should have been bought 20 years ago. It's easy to say, in 1971, that the advent of psychedelia ten years earlier would rekindle an interest in its spiritual ancestor, art nouvea, so that the timely purchase of Aubrey Beardsley drawings, Tiffany lamp shades and all the other flotsam of that peculiar and fascinating epoch would be richly rewarding. (Tiffany wisteria lamps, available for $100 or so in the Fifties, now command $15,000-$20,000; Truman Capote, you will be happy to learn, owns two.) It's equally easy to say that pop and op art would create demand for their forebears--old comic books and trompe-l'oeil paintings--so that the purchase of these, at the proper time, would also have proved profitable. And it's just as easy to say that the awakening of black cultural awareness was bound to increase the value of Negro- or slavery-related objects or documents (a field, incidentally, where prices are a long way from their peak). These statements are easy to make, because they are all made after the fact. But without the advantage of hindsight, who in the world can know? Sixteen years of American involvement in Indochina has not kindled any new interest in its magnificent Khmer artifacts nor in anything else Indo-Chinese. (A stunning Cambodian head of Buddha, dating from the Seventh Century and surely something of a minor masterpiece from the early days of a civilization that was to produce the miracles of Angkor Wat, sold for just $175 at Parke-Bernet in 1970.) The trend toward sexual freedom has aroused no new longings for the pornographic art and literature of yesteryear. And the assassination of President Kennedy sparked no new infatuation (as many history collectors had expected) in Lincoln's assassination nor in Lincolniana--though it did set off a frenzied speculative scramble for Kennedy-related coins, stamps, manuscripts and other mementos, a search that must have culminated, in a way, when a Nashville collector of Kennedyana purchased the Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas for $650,000--because he "just didn't want to see it torn down or turned into something distasteful."

In short, nothing is more fickle than popular taste and nothing more hazardous than a bet placed on it. Then, too, even if you wager correctly, you may not have the satisfaction of spending your profits. In the middle of the last century, when wealthy American taste makers were paying boxcar figures for the cloying Barbizon canvases you now find over the player pianos at plastic Gay Nineties bars, one eccentric collector, fames Jackson Jarves, spent a decade in Italy (and $60,000, then a goodly sum) gathering an unbelievably exquisite colleclion of Italian primitive paintings--Madonnas on gold backgrounds and the like--which at that time were universally ignored. Jarves subsequently fell on bad times and found, to his chagrin, that he couldn't sell his collection for one third of its cost. The cultural meccas of Boston and New York rejected his oilers outright. Yale University finally took the paintings, as collateral on a $20,000 loan. When Jarves defaulted, Yale had to swallow the collection, becauseno one else wanted it. The paintings--including masterpieces by Gentile da Fabriano, Antonio Pollaiuolo and Sassetta--blushed unseen for 50 years, wasting their sweetness on the dank air of a New Haven warehouse. Thereafter, when their place in art history was acknowledged, Jarves came to be known (posthumously, of course) as a collector of great genius and rare discernment--a man far ahead of his time. Too far ahead for his own good.

• • •

The expert approach is much less hazardous and can be extremely profitable--if you are an expert. This simply requires an ability to recognize value that has not yet been recognized by others. Usually, a serious collector will be quite knowledgeable in his own field. He certainly should be, for his own protection: The possibility of forgery or other fraud exists whenever collectors are willing to pay high prices for items that can be reproduced cheaply. If a collector is very serious, or if his specialty is relatively narrow, he can count on knowing more than most dealers. The exigencies of business make dealers carry such a broad spectrum of wares that they can rarely appreciate the manifold subtleties of any one item. So the knowledgeable and eagle-eyed collector can sometimes perceive great value where the dealer sees only merchandise. Dealers actually enjoy being "conned" in this fashion. After all, they make a profit on everything they sell. The "find" will certainly bring the collector back and the attendant publicity from a major discovery will bring out droves of bargain hunters, most of whom will buy junk at inflated prices.

Playboy Contributing Editor J. Paul Getty is renowned for his expertise in other areas, but possibly the best investment he ever made was a painting, or, as he describes it, "an unprepossessing canvas...in somewhat poor condition," that he purchased for $200 at a London art auction in 1938. It turned out to be Raphael's long-lost Madonna of Loreto, worth literally millions today. More recently, a suburban Chicago collector of religious prints, attending a local church rummage sale, purchased an extremely rare Rembrandt etching--Jesus Healing the Sick, worth perhaps $15,000--for a dime. And a diligent search through old Philadelphia court records led Alfred Frankenstein, an expert on 19th Century American painting, to two spinster sisters whose home was a minor treasure-trove of "lost" paintings and other memorabilia of the great American trompe-l'oeil master William Harnett. One of the most important paintings from this find, Front Face, a portrait of a Negro child in a soldier suit, realized $67,500 at Parke-Bernet in 1970.

An even more astonishing art discovery involved a hapless New York junk dealer. During the Depression, before he became famous, Jackson Pollock, like so many others in every creative field, labored for the Works Progress Administration. Dozens and dozens of Pollock's early realist canvases wound up in a Government warehouse in Queens. At the height of World War Two, during an acute shortage of piping insulation, the junk dealer purchased the lot--for four cents a pound. He was disappointed to discover that their insulating value was negligible, but he managed to unload them on a Greenwich Village bric-a-brac shop, which, in turn, retailed them for between $3 and $25. Today, these paintings sell for anywhere from $6000 to $12,000.

• • •

The synergistic approach is among the least rewarding financially, but is highly gratifying in spiritual terms and especially attractive to the interested amateur who has neither a great fortune at his disposal nor a great store of expertise to draw upon. This approach takes advantage of a quirk of collecting: In many instances, as a collection develops, the whole becomes progressively more valuable than the sum of its parts. Sometimes you don't need many parts. A small yellow envelope, bearing a U.S. five-cent stamp from 1847 (the first year the Government issued stamps) and socked with a blue oval steamboat cancellation, is a lovely collector's item, worth $500 or more. A similar envelope from the same correspondence, addressed in the same hand to the same place and bearing the companion ten-cent stamp, is even more desirable, worth over $1000. But when the two are gathered together, they form a matchless and unique philatelic showpiece. Value? Close to $10,000 when last auctioned, perhaps $15,000 today. Similarly, a single Blue Fitzhugh teacup is a quaint curio worth a few dollars. A cup with matching saucer is much more interesting--$50 or so. A matched pair of cups and saucers is quite desirable--$300, at least. And a full service is a pearl beyond price.

The appeal of this approach to the novice collector-investor is obvious: If you can find one of something, chances are you might someday find another. Magically, both increase in value just by being brought together. Note, however, that the synergistic approach applies only to objects that (for whatever reason) are more desirable grouped than individually. Sixty random Picasso prints are no more valuable en masse than singly. But if each of the 60 is dated a different year between 1909 and 1970, then the owner has a marvelous insight into a great artist's development--as well as an extremely valuable collection, worth many times what its parts would yield separately.

• • •

The utilitarian approach also provides benefits more spiritual than financial; but, in addition, it offers material comforts of the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too variety and it holds a special appeal for relatively young newcomers to the collector-investment field. This technique takes advantage of the fact that many pieces of antique furniture (as well as other useful or decorative household items) are just as comfortable and attractive as their latter-day equivalents, no more expensive and decidedly better investments. Faced with furnishing an apartment, for instance, a man could easily spenda few thousand dollars on stainless steel, walnut and Plexiglas right off the floor at his local department store. Later, when his taste changes, he'll be lucky to emerge with a decent tax write off by donating it all to the Salvation Army. But the same amount of money would have gone a long way toward purchasing a suite of genuine antiques that, assuming normal wear and tear, would ultimately be resalable at a price very close to the original cost or perhaps even at a profit. Of course, furniture master pieces are out of the question here. Even given die $50,000-$100,000 purchase price, no one in his right mind would ever use a Philadelphia escritoire or a Louis XV salon chair--least of all in the chaotic and hostile surroundings of a mid-city apartment. But great numbers of antiques, in many styles and from many eras, sell for prices close to their contemporary equivalents. American furniture from the Federal and Empire periods, for instance, is still available at bargain-basement prices; Federal-period pieces, especially, seem to wear well with modern decor. At every third antique shop on the Eastern Seaboard, you can buy those comfortable English-country captain's chairs, circa 1830 or 1840 (the round-backed type, with back and arms formed from the same curve), sturdy as the day they were made and glossy with the patina of generations of use, for between $75 and $100. Contemporary reproductions, of inferior material, workmanship and design, begin around $80. In London, you can still purchase 17th Century coffers, heavy oak chests, usually strapped in leather or metal, the earliest pieces of household furniture that survive, for under $100. Many of these predate the pilgrims and all served in the age when everything of value in a typical household could be locked up in one heavy trunk. Besides being starkly beautiful in their own right, these ancient pieces work well in any modern surrounding and without desecration can provide first-rate accommodation for tape decks, turntables and similar 20th Century necessities.

The utilitarian approach works even with art, as evidenced by Theodore Pitcairn, a Pennsylvania theologian who vaulted into the headlines three years ago, when he released an item from his long-cherished collection of French impressionist paintings. The work was Monet's La Terrassea Sainte Adresse. Pitcairn had purchased it for $11,000 in the Twenties and then must have had trouble justifying it to his clerical friends. The painting sold at Christie's for $1,411,200, an impressionist record. After the sale, when eager reporters pressed him to explain his investment genius, the perplexed clergyman thought for a while and declared, "I bought things that I wanted to hang in my house."

Granting the extremity of this example, the technique also applies on a more modest level. The price of a few Keane children and a pink-hatted clown will buy a worthwhile Chagall lithograph or a signed-on-the-plate Picasso print. And out-of-the-way antique shops or even thrift shops will occasionally yield fairly complete settings of Victorian flatware, in ornate patterns that are just now re-emerging as popular, for a fraction of the cost of a modern imitation. High Victorian fainting couches and settees--resplendent with hand-carved mahogany cherubim--still can't find homes at $100 each, despite what is supposed to be a renascence of Victoriana, and despite the observable fact that they couldn't be reproduced today at almost any price.

Obviously, purchases employing this technique can't be made with a straight investment end in view. Comfort, style and setting must be considered as well. Virtually all low-priced antiques are bought for use, not for contemplation, so appropriateness, comfort and durability should loom large in the mind of the would-be purchaser, if not for his own satisfaction, then for protection when he sells. The much-heralded Victorian revival, for example, despite a decade of ballyhoo, has yet to affect the price of Victorian furniture. In years to come, the boom in Victoriana might well turn out to be just another journalistic fantasy. In truth, most high Victorian furniture is hideously ugly. The kindest thing to be said about it is that it doesn't wear well in a contemporary setting. Unless you own an unconverted brownstone or are decorating a fin-de-siècle brothel, there's almost nothing you can do with it. On the other hand, art nouveau furnishings work well in modern surroundings and are already priced accordingly.

• • •

Whichever technique the novice chooses, he'll soon find there are only two major sources of material: dealers and auction houses. As a general rule, the newcomer should start out with a dealer, avoiding the auction market until he has attained a bit of expertise. Some dealers are obviously better than others, but instinct and spadework will soon locate one who's simpatico. Most dealers know their field; if they didn't, they wouldn't last in it. Often they have become dealers after being collectors themselves. Either their collection or their love of it grew so great as to demand their total energies. Such men discuss their field knowledgeably and endlessly, delighting in leading the newcomer through its nuances. (Of course, they're developing a good customer in the process.) Additionally, dealers have their reputations to guard. As noted, collectors are notoriously cliquish. One collector's good will can mean three or four newcustomers. Toward this end, many dealers back their wares unconditionally, forever. Instances abound in which they have taken back items, even after decades, that have been found to be other than what they were sold as. Dealers also extend credit--usually interest-free--to favored customers. For anyone more investor than collector, this can be crucially important. Even the expert collector will rarely dispense with dealers' services. First, such a collector would probably number dealers among his closest friends. Then, too, a successful dealer has lines out the world over and good connections with fellow dealers. Once he knows a collector's interest, he'll be able to unearth material that no collector, no matter how dedicated, could hope to locate on his own.

The dealer's services don't come cheap. Especially if his goods are bulky--furniture or paintings, for example--he will need a costly showroom, usually in an elegant neighborhood. Just to break even, he's got to mark up his goods considerably. There's not a rare-object dealer in the country who has a markup per item of less than 50 percent. For slow-moving material, 100 percent is typical. Dealers will visually repurchase things they've sold; but unless considerable time has passed or the item has been extraordinarily popular, the collector shouldn't expect to recoup his original price or anywhere near it.

The desire to avoid the dealer markup attracts collectors to the auction market. Auctions, after all, are where dealers get many of their wares. The collector who buys at auction can expect to save perhaps 50 percent off dealer prices. However, buying at auction is fraught with perils. The need for expertise is great and immediate, since goods cannot be returned unless instantly proved counterfeit. Also, the prospective buyer at auction is never certain he's bidding against real competition. This doesn't faze the collector, but it should the investor. Sometimes an agent of the owner will attempt to bid the price up; other times, the auctioneer will be pulling bids off the wall, in an attempt to meet an undisclosed minimum price (called a reserve) below which the owner will not sell. (For more details, see Auction Action, Playboy, March 1969.) An additional difficulty, and one that is generally not appreciated even by million-dollar art investors, is that, speaking strictly from an investment standpoint, the auction market is a poor place to buy blue-ribbon material. Assume a first-class and undeniably authentic Rembrandt painting were to be discovered and offered at auction. The attendant publicity would reach collectors the world over. Every serious potential buyer would be represented at the sale. Bidding would be spirited and high. And the ultimate winner would be forced to pay more than any other informed buyer thinks the painting is worth. That's how auctions work. If the successful bidder is a collector or a museum director, fine, he has his Rembrandt and doesn't care what he paid. But if he is an investor, he finds himself in a difficult position. The people he outbid are the very ones to whom he could reasonably hope to sell later on--and he's already paidmore than they are willing to.

That is why so many big-time art purchases are private transactions, in which price is never a matter of public record. Auctions are wonderful places to buy items whose value has not been appreciated by others. But strictly from a profit-and-loss point of view, they are not the best way to invest in museum-class pieces, about which everything is already known.

But if all you're interested in is profit, you shouldn't be dabbling in collector's items at all. As money machines, the stock and commodities markets are much more attractive. After all, there are only 50-odd commodities and 1200-odd major stocks. But the universe of rare books, autographs, paintings, antiques and God knows what else contains millions or even billions of collectable items--and no two of them are exactly alike. Only if you are willing to forgo a chunk of the profits (and the losses) that you might make in the more traditional investment media, and only if you have a genuine desire to collect, should you take the plunge.

However and whatever you buy, you'll be better off, both monetarily and spiritually, if you know what you're doing. In the collector investments perhaps more than anywhere else, knowledge pays rich dividends. No matter what you elect to collect, you'll find, if you look long enough, specialized books, magazines, monographs and other collectors--all good sources of advice. But such advice consists of just words. Words can be helpful but not as helpful as an intimacy with the objects themselves, an intimacy that can come only by finding, buying, holding and cherishing them--in other words, by collecting them. You'll probably make false starts and you'll surely make bad buys. But if you select a compatible subject and keep at it, you'll eventually find that you're learning things, that you're enjoying yourself--and perhaps even that you're making some money.