From crisp bags to cook books, and horse brasses to Harry Potter

Published by Miller’s. ISBN 1840003863. £17.99.

THIS is the 13th volume of the popular Miller’s guide and by way of comparison into the change in our collecting passions below is a look at earlier editions.

The press release for volume III 1992-93 refers to a “collecting world buzzing with bag mania” and is headed How Much for Your Old Crisp Packets? £20, apparently for a Golden Wonder 1970s paper bag. The contents list of the 1990-1991 edition includes horse brasses and harnesses for the new-olde looke pubbe, and an entry for police has... one modern Chief Constable’s hat £100-130, with an index that takes in chewing gum machines, What the Butler Saw machines, and Tribal Art, African, North American Indian and Rest of the World.

Comparing a few ceramics prices... in the 1990-91 edition there are four entries for Susie Cooper, with the most expensive being a classic, green, beige, pink and grey vase at £100-£150. Two pages of Moorcroft in 1992-93 offer a banded Pomegranate vase, impressed Moorcroft at a price guide of £1000-1100. For 2001 Moorcroft’s Pomegranate pattern is price guided at £400-475 but a Moorcroft Sally Tuffin Carp pattern has a £1200-1400 price tag. Odd reflection of the market?

This year’s collecting obsessions include collectable cats and dogs and there’s a certain inevitability about Harry Potter and cookery books. In its Science and Technology section, along with a saccharometer and the first voice synthesiser there is a chunk of tubes, wires and bits from ENIAC, the world’s first digital computer, priced at £45,000-plus. There’s a ‘peep’ at an erotica section and a brief history of the bathing suit appears in textiles; nothing erotic here, but there may well be in one of the oddest pieces of jewellery ever made, a pair of French silver cufflinks, depicting a man receiving an enema via an enormous syringe, late 19th century, £140-160. Well... that’s certainly not British but our collecting mania certainly is.