Collectables

Since she moved to France two decades ago Rebecca Lloyd Marlow has visited the country’s countless markets looking for antique buttons.

The ice pick carried by geologist Frank Debenham (1883-1965) during the doomed Terra Nova British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-13 sold for £22,000 (plus buyer’s premium) at Cheffins earlier this month. The estimate was just £200-400.

Among the 70-plus exhibitors attending the Textile Society’s annual Antique and Vintage Textiles Fair at the Armitage Centre in Manchester on Sunday, April 14, is fan specialist Mary Cooper.

A sledge from the first expedition to the Antarctic led by Ernest Shackleton sold for £115,000 in Bonhams’ Travel and Exploration sale on February 6.

In the latest of our occasional series of collector interviews, we talk to Penny Savill who collects irons, buttonhooks and jigsaw puzzles. She recently co-ordinated Pressing Matters, a display of irons presented by members of the British Iron Collectors group at the Art & Antiques for Everyone Fair at the NEC in November.

This Valentine’s card, below, by the French artist Xavier Sager was posted from Finland in 1917 to an address in Norway. It is priced at £15 from Val Jackson-Harris, a dealer in printed ephemera from the 18th-19th and early 20th centuries.

Small in scale and relatively light on the purse, buttons are a rich collecting seam that many can mine.

One of the more unusual corkscrews to come onto what is a fiercely competitive collectors’ market recently was a brass, steel and wooden contraption of the type one may have seen clamped to the bar of fin-de-siècle brasseries.

High-priced luxury handbags and other luxury goods made the most money at Tennants (20% buyer’s premium) sale of Costume, Accessories and Textiles at Leyburn but collectors’ interest was more focused on a private collection of hat pins.