Setting out his stall of Victorian mementos
Victorian China Fairings: The Collectors’ Guide by Derek H. Jordan, published by the Antique Collectors’ Club, ISBN 1851494464, £35hb. WITH a book dedication by the author to “all my non-collecting friends who I have bored silly over the years”, Derek Jordan has a massive private collection of these little Victorian/Edwardian china ornaments with their droll comments on life, buying his first three fairings at the Folkestone Antiques Fair.
With seven levels of value, from £50 up to £3000 for the rarer Group X, which includes the average price paid at auction with a margin of 20 per cent either way, the alphabetical index to captions to a non-collector seems slightly weird and some of this must be lost in translation of the inscriptions.