Collecting Articles

Dolls Houses

• Rubber gloves! Beautiful. I've been looking for a pair of these for nearly two years. Penny Whitehouse hasn't just spotted a pair of marigolds - these rubber gloves are exactly an inch long. I've found others that come close to being right, but they're always too bulky. Rubber is thick and hard to shape so getting the fingers this delicate is really hard.
  
  Every year over 3,000 collectors flock to the Kensington Dolls House Festival to adorn their dolls' houses with miniature books, chandeliers, wheelbarrows, ordinance survey maps, cabbages, brandy, monopoly sets and just about anything else you can think of, in miniature. And there isn't a child in sight. In the sea of blue-rinsed pensioners, the youngest collector in the room is probably pushing 50.
  
  Next to a stall selling tiny pseudo-Victorian portraits is a stall selling miniature copies of Hello magazine for £7.50 and miniature pots of Vaseline. After a special request, Platts Mini Packages started selling tiny packets of sliced bread: I already sell non-sliced, but this customer wanted sliced, said stall owner Liza Lawrence. It is hard to see what difference a single word on the outside of the 1cm high packet of 'Hovis' could possibly make, considering it's stuffed with toilet roll anyway, but miniature collectors like perfection.
  
  It's all about control, says Charlotte Stokoe, organiser of this year's Kensington Dolls House Exhibition. It's about a house with no dirty dishes, that you can control completely, with no kids to mess it up. It's really appealing to a lot of people.
  
  The Kensington Dolls House Festival, which was held on the 16th, 17th and 18th of May this year, is celebrating its 25th birthday and claims to be the most high profile exhibition of its nature in Europe. The festival takes place in Kensington Town Hall because, as the brochure says, it is a civilised venue with "decent loos".
  
  The idea of perfection dominates each tiny product at the exhibition. Pointing to a tiny Victorian portrait, the stall holder assures customers it has been hand painted on vellum. What is vellum? The skin of an unborn calf comes the answer.
  
  Terry Neville started selling miniature books four years ago when he realised there was a healthy market. His trademark is that each book actually contains all, or a healthy chunk, of the actual text.Recently his company managed to get copyright to reprint the full set of Ian Fleming James Bond novels, 1/12th of the actual scale.Do they sell?
  
  Yes: but not as well as Bibles. The miniature Bibles each contain 17 chapters of Revelations. Revelations was chosen because the market is primarily interested in the hell fire and damnation aspect of their miniature Bibles, says Neville.Each small book is cut by hand, stitched, and takes about two days to make. Dateman books sells over 200 titles and has been experimenting with producing books in 1/24th scale. Although there is a demand, the 1cm high books, each with real pages, have too high a failure rate to be profitable.
  
  There is even a market for 1 inch high Bibles in French. One copy was recently returned to Mr. Neville for having the accents in the wrong place. The collector had been reading, for leisure, the 1mm high characters.
  
  John Hodgson, who has been in the business for 30 years, says dolls' house collecting isn't all about kitchens and bathrooms. A German lady once asked if he sold miniature torture instruments, presumably to furnish her dolls' house dungeon.
  
  Acquiring the tools of espionage for your dolls' house is not as hard as you might imagine. Put a secret drawer in a piece of furniture and it will sell. "If the customer is undecided - you've shown them the diamond glasses and the tortoise shell lid and they're still not sure - you just pop open the secret drawer and they'll take it," says John Hodgson, whose Dutch tea caddy complete with a hidden pop-out drawer retails at around £500.
  
  Collecting miniatures is not cheap. Mr Hodgson's four poster bed, circa 1770 but about the size of a shoebox, will sell for £675. Mr Hodgson describes his American collectors as like children with money. The general feeling is that sales and customers have increased this year. Along with thermos flasks and British holidays, collecting miniatures is yet another hobby that looks like it could be thriving in the recession.As one collector tells me: "I can't afford a house in Tuscany or a medieval castle in real life, so I buy them in miniature. It's a total, total substitute.
  
  But that doesn't explain the motives of The Sultan. The Sultan is a legend amongst those who sell miniatures. There are whispers of him over by the tiny flower pots (1cm high, £2.50) and the meat carcasses (6cm long, looks vaguely like a cow, £14). Simon Walker sells tiny things made of silver and explains: "He walks through the stalls with his entourage and just points at things he wants - and the minions just buy them for him." Mr Walker must be secretly hoping that The Sultan will walk past his stall and point at his prized product, a miniature silver car costing £4,500.
  
  John Hodgson knows more about The Sultan. Rumour has it he is a very wealthy royal from Qatar who is "quiet, kind and reserved" and turns up at exhibitions with suitcases full of money. The Sultan, although an avid miniatures collector, doesn't seem to have made an appearance today.
  
  Facts about Dolls' Houses:- The earliest known miniature houses are nearly 5000 years old and were found in Egyptian tombs - Dolls' house collectors in England use two scales: 1/12th and 1/24th. The former is more popular.- One of the most famous dolls houses is Queen Mary's dolls house which was built in 1924 and is on display at Windsor Castle - Judy Dench is a known collector - For information about the Kensington Dolls House Christmas Show go to www.dollshousefestival.com
  
  An $8.5 million dollshouse

What To Put Away For 2030

Ten collectibles of 2030

Alternative investments are especially attractive when stock markets are in turmoil. So Times Money asked five antiques experts to name their best bets for collectibles of the future. We wanted contemporary items that could be bought online or in mainstream shops for £100 or less and should increase in value - hopefully significantly - by 2030. Their tips are supplemented by our own choice and by two suggestions from Christie's for bigger spenders. To realise the best price in a future sale, all items should be kept in original condition, with all packaging. Note that predicted prices are in today's terms and do not take inflation into account.

"I'm not a plastic bag" by Anya Hindmarch
Anita Manning, Great Western Auctions
Expert on Bargain Hunt (BBC) and Flog It! (BBC)
We should look for something which will reflect our present day world, is well designed, made in limited editions and, if possible, of some quality. Anya Hindmarch's "I'm not a plastic bag" re-usable canvas tote is my bet for a collectible of the future. It reflects our present day concern for climate change and preserving the resources of our planet. These bags were made in limited editions of four colours and sold new at Sainsbury's for just £5. They are already changing hands on eBay for eight times that. Anya Hindmarch is one of our leading designers, and the bags were not only topical but gave people a chance to buy a designer piece which would otherwise be out of their reach. By 2030 I predict that these will become collectors' pieces and change hands for at least £500. Condition is all important, so store carefully.

Times Money adds: The bag is no longer available from Sainsbury's. Examples in original condition can, however, be had on eBay for around £20 to £30.

The mobile phone
Philip Serrell, Philip Serrell Auctioneers & Valuers
Expert on Bargain Hunt and Flog It!
Think of one possession that most of us have at least one of. Sometimes these gems of modern day technology are given to us and we pay for the privilege of using them. In my view the mobile phone has revolutionised our lives and will become collectable in the way that phone cards have. But make sure you keep all the accessories, including the packaging (and the thing that fits in the ear that makes one look like a night club bouncer). Surely the front runner will be the Del Boy brick. Value in thirty years time? Who knows but in today's terms my guess is £100 or more.

Times Money adds: Carphone Warehouse sells a vast range of handsets. Retrobrick deals in classic mobiles, including the Motorola DynaTAC 8500x used by Derek Trotter at £59.

The celebrity autograph
Philip Serrell
Alternatively, my £100 could be spent travelling to rock concerts, film premieres and sporting events to collect autographs. The four Beatles signatures from the early 60s are now worth thousands. Sadly as time passes and our heroes pass with it, the value of their signatures can only increase. I think I would have to try to persuade young racing driver Lewis Hamilton to sign my small book. Value in the future? Well there is the gamble, but if our Lewis wins Championship after Championship and, perhaps, becomes very reclusive, then his mark could well be worth as much as £500 by the year 2030.

Times Money adds: Autograph Magazine has some interesting features on "philography" here.

David Linley gifts
Philip Serrell
The trouble with choosing a collectible of tomorrow is one needs the ability to predict fashion changes. Will Beckham Fragrances aftershave (from £15) - complete in its carton - become collectable? Who will be the next Banksy and turn graffiti into gold? For my third choice, I would log on to the website of David Linley, furniture maker and the Queen's nephew. There I would probably go for either the set of 10 cased pencils at £15 or a rosewood bookmark shaped as a paperclip at £19, all stamped Linley. This investment would have it all - a royal connection linked to a sought after designer name. How could it fail to be worth £100 or more in thirty years' time? Provided of course I hadn't sharpened my pencils. Times Money adds: Another affordable item with a Royal Connection is this £45 gardener's gift set from the Prince of Wales' Duchy Originals range, with a hand trowel, hand fork and wooden box-cum-planter.

Children's books
Kate Bliss, independent fine art valuer
Expert on Bargain Hunt and Flog It!
It is no secret that collectibles in mint condition are the most desirable and expensive. Mint collectible children's books are rare - most have been loved and enjoyed repeatedly and bear the scars. I particularly love children's pop-up books, not only the most vulnerable to damage but a world of discovery for toddlers meeting books for the first time. I remember as a child Haunted House by Jan Pienkowski, a pop-up book published in the 1970s and 80s, that has already become a collector's item. I think the classics such as Eric Hill's Spot books and Rod Campbell's Dear Zoo available in bookshops today for as little as £4.99 will be worth collecting for the future. By 2030, a mint example may be worth three or four times its price and should continue to rise in value. My tip is buy two copies and keep one away from sticky fingers!

Times Money adds: Amazon.co.uk has a huge selection.

The mouse mat
Elizabeth Talbot, Diss Auction Rooms
Expert on Bargain Hunt and Flog It!
My nomination for an affordable contemporary item that should increase in value is the humble mouse mat. They are a creation specifically for the current age, have no predecessor and will be made redundant by swiftly developing technology in the very near future. Therefore, although mass-produced, we already know there will not be an infinite supply. Being a piece of equipment, bought to be pressed into service, most mouse mats are ripped out of their packaging without a second thought being paid to it. Therefore, a mouse mat in original packaging or original condition will be a rare find in 22 years time. I believe a new mat currently costing £5 to 20 with any of the desirable characteristics sought by a collector may well sell-on for £50 to £100-plus in 2030.

Times Money adds: Google "mouse pad" as well as "mouse mat" if shopping online. Interesting options include Mouse Rugs and the London Transport Museum's Underground map mats.

Something craft-y
David Harper
Expert on Bargain Hunt
Avoid anything that is readily available in every department or furniture store in the land. What you are looking for is rarity, individualism and something made by hand by a craftsman. So, the trick is to find a talented potter, painter or sculptor either locally or through the internet - someone who's work you like and will enjoy owning. Buy it from them direct, make sure you keep the receipt with the item and even better get the artist to sign a letter of authenticity and if you can, have your picture taken with them! It all sounds a bit cheeky, but if they drop dead in ten years time and turn into an Andy Warhol, you will be quids in.

Times Money adds: The Crafts Council can help you to find a suitable maker.

For bigger spenders

According to experts at Christie's, two wines that should make a good investment are:

Chateau Mouton Rothschild 2000 - now £500 a bottle at The Antique Wine Company

Chateau Lafite Rothschild 2000 - now £1,295 a bottle at Berry Bros. & Rudd

Note also: "The 2005 vintage wines will start to be traded in the auction market in 2008, and I expect that the top wines from this vintage will increase in value, as it is a superb vintage, possibly as good as 1961."

If wine does not appeal, Christie's tips "cutting-edge" gadgets, such as the Apple iPod and iPhone.

"Whether we'll sell this sort of thing by 2030 remains to be seen, but the consensus is that they could potentially be of interest."

The compiler's choice

A browse of Abebooks.com shows that signed first edition books by popular authors can rocket in value. Hatchard's, of Piccadilly, always has a good selection, many for under £20. One good bet for 2030 could be The Reaver, the last novel of George Macdonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels, who died on January 2. This costs £18.99. As an example of investment potential, a signed first edition of Spike Milligan's Robin Hood I bought new for £10.99 in 1998 now fetches around £300 in as-new condition.

Jukeboxes

They've been through hell together and the parties were great

I bought my jukebox, a 1974 Wurlitzer Americana 3800, in the spring of 1999. She holds 200 7in singles, gives off the purple glow of a fading radioactive sunset, hums like a 1950s refrigerator and reminds you what records were supposed to sound like - not thin and compressed into machine computer code, but vast, warm and with lots of legroom. But in the age of the iPod, when a sleek unit smaller than a cigarette pack can store literally thousands of songs, what can possibly be the attraction of owning a kennel-sized metal box full of scratched vinyl, uniquely unportable and with a volume control that you need a screwdriver to operate? And, at this special time of year, for anyone considering making an impulsive Christmas purchase - as we have been encouraged to do by manufacturers - what are the pros and cons of investing in such a cumbersome antique?

Today, in pubs and bars, the jukebox stuffed with a few dozen scratched 7in singles advertised by a crudely handwritten playlist has been replaced by a compact, brightly lit unit crammed with CDs offering thousands of instantaneous entertainment choices. Or else it's a curious novelty item, flagged as one of the attractions of a desperately fashionable hang-out: German beers. Italian sausages. Original 1950s jukebox.

Or, worse still, the vintage jukebox has been stolen from the public it was built to serve, and squirreled away in the corner of a room by a selfish middle-aged music fan, whose semi-autistic, fetishistic approach to the object bears no immediate relation to the innocence with which the machine would once have been enjoyed by happy-go-lucky teenagers. Me, in other words.

When I bought my jukebox, I had just co-written a well-received television series that I had no reason to assume would be cancelled immediately. I wrongly imagined I could easily afford the £1,000 price tag Juke Box Services of Twickenham, who heroically recondition old jukeboxes, had attached to the Wurlitzer. I reasoned that I might soon even have a flat of my own to keep it in. Three months later, work had dried up, and my unjustifiably self-indulgent purchase was finally delivered to a second-floor, northeast London maisonette, where three men struggled to stuff her through a doorway ultimately too narrow to accommodate her. The Wurlitzer went back to Twickenham for a few weeks.I measured my window frames and booked a hydraulic lift, an expense I could suddenly no longer really afford. A decade later, I really should have double-glazed this flat, but one day Wurlitzer will need to exit through the same window by which she once entered, so we shiver, but while we shiver, we are listening to the aching bass part of the Byrds' Hey, Mr Tambourine Man as it was meant to be heard.

The first lesson of jukebox ownership is this. Never buy anything bigger than your house.The physical bulk of the purchase dealt with, there is then the issue of what to stock the jukebox with. I bought the Americana 3800 because she held the most 7-inches, but I soon realised that I was about to begin wrestling with the terrible dilemma of what, exactly, would be my 200 favourite singles of all time.

Nick Hornby has made a literary career out of anatomising this curiously male desire to arrive at ultimate lists of definite best-ofs, be they musical or sporting. And stocking a juke-box gives a man a way of setting in stone, or at least in little slots on a rotating platform, the physical evidence of his long-apprenticed professorship in good taste.I gathered up all the singles I had bought throughout my life, and scoured the internet, second-hand shops and record fairs to plug the gaps in the wants list I had scrupulously drawn up. I imagined visitors prostrate in admiration at my immaculate selection, which would have cherry-picked the finest moments from every era of popular music, while still including enough rarities and obscurities perhaps to expand my guests' inevitably narrow horizons a little as well, to make them realise how much better informed - and how much better a person - I was than them.

The procedure was fun. The website www.gemm.com was a gold-mine of cheap 7-inches, and I still remember the moments when some sought- after items presented themselves in the flesh. Barbara Ray's heart-rending country and western weepy I Don't Wanna Play House leapt out of the rack of a charity shop somewhere in the Western Australian desert; the Tenors' early reggae classic Ride Yu Donkey revealed itself, unexpectedly, on a stall in Spitalfields Market; a four-track EP by Cannonball Adderley and Nancy Wilson arrived in the post in an unexpectedly beautiful picture sleeve.

In the end, the Wurlitzer kind of stocked herself. Anything recorded much after the early 1980s sounded too thin and clattering in her vast speaker cabinets. She preferred the warm fuzz of vintage psychedelia and the Cuban-heeled stamp of the 1960s beat boom, the joyful stomp of vintage soul floor-fillers and the scratchy minimalism of 1970s punk; the booming basslines of 1950s Chicago blues and the plangent laments of country singers.

The Wurlitzer is a high-maintenance mistress. I scour the internet for replacement styluses and, on more than one occasion, the engineer from Juke Box Services has had to be cajoled into making a long journey north. But I am grateful to the Wurlitzer because she cured me of musical pretension, or at least staved it off for a few seasons. I was 30 years old, a die-hard music fan and even a semi-professional critic, drawn ever further away from the three- minute pop songs that first captured my imagination into worlds of free jazz and post-rock and white noise. The Wurlitzer reminded me of the irrepressible power of the perfect 7in. And with a flat stuffed with revellers, she made a succession of New Years' Eves in the early Noughties swing in a way that poring over a box set of Albert Ayler albums probably wouldn't have done. I remain eternally delighted by my expensive mistake. But remember. A jukebox is not just for Christmas.

PanAm First Class Cabin

Man Spends $50,000 to Recreate a First-Class Pan Am Cabin in His Garage

Anthony Toth is so obsessed with perfectly recreating a vintage Pan Am first-class cabin in his garage that he once traveled to Thailand for - wait for it - original Pan Am branded headphones. And his obsession goes much deeper than that.

Anthony began his obsession with Pan Am as a child, when he and his parents frequently flew to Europe to visit family. Pan Am's service seems decadent and almost silly today, when Southwest and JetBlue achieve success with a budget mentality, but to Anthony, Pan Am was the epitome of class and style.

Pan Am was once synonymous with international jet-setting, with upper-deck dining rooms and flight attendants decked out in crisp blue uniforms, high heels and white gloves. First-class travelers were served out of silver-plated martini pitchers. A parade of linen-covered food carts made its way down the aisle at dinnertime.

Anthony saved things like the cardboard linings on food trays and recorded his trips with multiple rolls of film and extensive tape recordings of the radio selection on board. "This consumed my world," said Tosh. As an adult, he works for United Airlines, and two years ago bought a home with an oversized garage in which he could build a faithful replica of Pan Am's first-class cabin. The project has taken him, in total, 20 years.

Construction required multiple visits out to a spot in Death Valley where airplane carcasses are dumped, but the details of his project are unnervingly precise: The replica isn't open to the public, but if you visit (Tosh hosts executive meetings sometimes, appropriately enough), you'll be offered drink service and given a perfectly-crafted souvenir boarding pass designed to match those used by the airline in the late '70s and early '80s. He's got authentic Pan Am swizzle sticks and glasses. The overhead compartments are original Pan Am construction. Hell, he's even got sealed packages of salted almonds (we have no evidence regarding the taste of 30-year-old almonds, but they're probably not for eating anyway).

The one concession he's made to the modern age? A flat-screen TV in place of the old-school projection Pan Am used. Everything else (save the stewardesses) is either original Pan Am or a custom-made replica. He's hoping to open his obsessive ode to Pan Am as a museum, but he seems perfectly content to just hang out in first class.

Obsessive Collectors - Eggers

Make-believe world of jailed egg thief, Richard Pearson

At 7.30am one autumn day in 2006 nine police officers arrived outside a semi-detatched house on a quiet suburban street in Cleethorpes.

Richard Pearson, 41, a painter and decorator, opened the door. His wife had gone to work; he called her to come home and take care of their six-month-old baby. There followed what one of the search team described as an interesting bit of dialogue between the two: she knew he was going to jail.

Pearson was jailed for five months at Skegness Magistrates' Court this week. PC Nigel Lound, from Lincolnshire Police, who led the search team, said: He was a pleasant chap, worked hard, family man. He just spent his weekends decimating our wild bird populations. He had become completely obsessive about collecting eggs.

Pearson led police to a back bedroom where, stacked in fish crates, biscuit tins and a suitcase, were more than 7,000 birds' eggs. There was a large sheaf of papers, photocopies of diaries that the police and the RSPB had never seen before.

They were the egg-hunting memoirs of Britain's most notorious egg collector, Colin Watson, who died in 2006 after falling out of a larch tree. The diaries, written in exercise books with dates encoded, were evidence of Pearson's links with Britain's strange and secretive society of eggers.

Guy Sharrock, a senior investigations officer at the RSPB, broke the code and spent a week reading and cataloguing the contents. They provided details of previously unsolved nest robberies. They also provided an insight into the minds of men who crawl up trees and down cliff faces, risking their lives in pursuit of prizes with no monetary value that can never be displayed in their homes for fear of a police raid.

They are always men. Mr Sharrock has seen doctors, dentists and police officers - he knows two conservation workers with spent convictions for collecting and an eccentric Norfolk millionaire - but for all that there is a strong trend for egg thieves to be working-class men who began collecting as children, following the example of a relative or a friend.

Gregory Wheal, a roofer, who has recently broken Watson's record with a ninth conviction for egg collecting, followed his father into the habit. He works for another convicted egg collector and lives in the egg-collecting capital of Britain, a suburban corner of north Coventry beside the M6.

Eggers frequently carry the journals of Victorian collectors, harking back to a time when raiding nests was considered a respectable pastime for ornithologists, yet they often appear to enjoy the challenges that the modern egg collector faces.

It's not just about taking eggs, Mr Sharrock said. It's about beating the police, beating the RSPB, beating the system.

Watson closed a rather typical diary entry with: It was now 04.30 and coming light so we called off the mission. He described car chases with the police, throwing freshly stolen osprey eggs out of the window. One of his associates told Mr Sharrock how, as police approached his car, his colleague had eaten a clutch of rare wader eggs to destroy the evidence.

The idea that stealing birds' eggs is comparable to the exploits of secret agents seems present in the letters of the Liverpool egg collectors, among them Carlton D'Cruze. When police and the RSPB raided his home, to find him kneeling in the bathroom, attempting to crush his collection and feed it into the lavatory, they found correspondence between collectors who were represented by numbers.

Mark Thomas, the RSPB inspector involved, said: They would write: 'From No 2 to No 5.' They would sign off saying: 'Destroy this after reading.'

Mr Thomas rolled his eyes. The letters were in a file marked 'Top Secret', he said.

The fever to collect mounts among the eggers as the breeding season approaches. When it begins they will be away every weekend. Information for the authorities' operations to catch the culprits often comes from wives tired of seeing their partners disappear for days on end.

It's all about trophies, Mr Sharrock said. The eggs are the trophies of their exploits in the field. Colin Watson would say: 'I can look at my clutch of golden eagle eggs and I can remember everything'.

Brain Scans of Hoarders Reveal Why They Never De-Clutter

Jill, a 60-year-old woman in Milwaukee, has overcome extreme poverty. So, now that she has enough money to put food in the fridge, she fills it. She also fills her freezer, her cupboard and every other corner of her home. “I use duct tape to close the freezer door sometimes when I’ve got too many things in there,” she told A&E’s Hoarders. Film footage of her kitchen shows a cat scrambling over a rotten grapefruit; her counters—and most surfaces in her home—seemed to be covered with several inches of clutter and spoiled food. “I was horrified,” her younger sister said after visiting Jill. And the landlord threatened eviction because the living conditions became unsafe.

Jill joins many others who have been outed on reality TV as a “hoarder.” We might have once called people with these tendencies “collectors” or “eccentrics.” But in recent years, psychiatrists had suggested they have a specific type of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). A movement is underfoot, however, for the new edition of the psychiatric field’s diagnostic bible (the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5), to move hoarding disorder to its own class of illness. And findings from a new brain scan study, published online August 6 in Archives of General Psychiatry, support this new categorization.

Hoarding disorder is categorized as “the excessive acquisition of and inability to discard objects, resulting in debilitating clutter,” wrote the researchers behind the new study, led by Yale University School of Medicine’s David Tolin.

Many of us might feel our homes or workspaces are far more cluttered than we would like—or than might be good for our peace of mind. But those with diagnosed hoarding disorder usually have taken this behavior to a different level. The Mayo Clinic even has a guide for treatment and prevention of hoarding disorder. One recommendation they provide: “Try to keep up personal hygiene and bathing. If you have possessions piled in your tub or shower, resolve to move them so that you can bathe.”

Some people hoard particular types of things, such as newspapers, craft supplies or clothing. Others, with a condition known as Diogenes syndrome, keep trash, including old containers, rotting food or human waste. Finally, as Animal Planet’s Animal Hoarders has shown, many hoarders collect more pets than they can appropriately care for, risking both their own and their animals’ health and safety.

To find out more about how the brains of hoarders might actually differ from those of healthy adults—and potentially even those with OCD—Tolin and his colleagues recruited 43 adults with a diagnosed hoarding disorder, 31 with OCD and 33 healthy adult controls to undergo fMRI brain scans. Each subject was asked to bring in a stack of miscellaneous, unsorted papers from their home, such as newspaper and junk mail. A similar collection of paper items from the experimenters was intermingled. Fifty items belonging to the subject and 50 items belonging to the experimenter were scanned and projected into the subject’s field of view in the fMRI. Subjects were asked to choose whether they wanted to keep a displayed item (either belonging to the subject or to the experimenters) or get rid of it by pressing a button. Afterward (and in a shorter pre-experiment training session), all of the discarded items were shredded right in front of them—ensuring that they knew that their decisions would have a real and immediate consequence.

Healthy controls chose to discard a mean of about 40 of the 50 items they brought. Those with OCD discarded about 37 items. But those with a hoarding disorder discarded only about 29 of the 50 things they brought. It also took hoarders slightly longer than healthy controls (2.8 seconds compared with 2.3 seconds) to make their decision about what to do with the items. And they reported substantially more anxiety, indecisiveness and sadness than healthy controls or those with OCD while making decisions.

Those with hoarding disorder showed key differences in the fMRI readings in both the anterior cingulate cortex, associated with detecting mistakes during uncertain conditions, and the mid- to anterior insula, linked to risk assessment, importance of stimuli and emotional decisions.

Interestingly, hoarders showed lower brain activity in these regions when they were deciding about other people’s items. But when they were faced with their own items, these areas of the brain showed much higher rates of signaling than those in either people with OCD or the healthy controls. Those with hoarding disorder also reported “greater anxiety, indecisiveness and sadness” during the decision-making process than those with OCD or the healthy controls.

As Tolin and his co-authors noted, hoarders are not necessarily eager to keep everything they possess, but rather “the disorder is characterized by a marked avoidance of decision-making about possessions.” And the extra activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and insula while evaluating what to do with their own items “may hamper the decision-making process by leading to a greater sense of outcome uncertainty,” the researchers noted. In other words, hoarders might often feel that they are at risk of making a wrong decision—and that that decision could bring with it greater risk than it actually would. “The slower decision-making may be a central feature of impaired decision making in hoarding,” the researchers noted.

The frequent theme on hoarder reality shows is that the individual does not realize that their lifestyle has spiraled out of control. Bernie, a 59-year-old Illinois woman featured on TLC’s Truth Be Told: I’m a Hoarder said, “I don’t consider myself to be a hoarder—not at all,” even after showing the film crew an entirely full house and a pool table room piled nearly to the ceiling with toys and other collected items—and after her daughter and son had implored her to clean up her house. As the authors of the new paper note, those with the disorder “are frequently characterized by poor insight about the severity of their condition, leading to resistance of attempts by others to intervene.” And as the Mayo Clinic notes, even if hoarders’ collections are disassembled, they often begin acquiring more items right away because their underlying condition has not been addressed.

As with for patients with OCD, those with hoarding disorder have had some success reducing negative symptoms by taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Psychotherapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy are also frequently employed to help patients overcome the disorder. Although neither of these approaches is a sure-fire way to cure hoarding, the biggest hurdle to recovery still seems to be recognizing the problem. And as the Mayo Clinic recommends, “getting treatment at the first sign of a problem may help prevent hoarding from becoming severe.”

Obsessives

Men who collect multiple copies of same album

(story begins bottom right corner "It's a Numbers Game")

Spitfires In Burma

If these Spitfires are where David Cundall thinks they are, in the condition that he claims they are, he may be selling his discovery short.

Original Spitfires are now so precious that collectors would consider £1.5 million per plane — the upper end of Mr Cundall’s price range — an extraordinary bargain. “£2.5 million to £2.8 million and up would be closer to the mark,” one expert told The Times last night.

Seventy years after their glory days, airworthy Spitfires fall into three categories: fully preserved specimens such as those flown by the RAF’s Battle of Britain Memorial Flight; reconditioned planes, which need only an original nameplate to qualify as authentic, however extensively they have been rebuilt with new parts; and replicas, which sometimes don’t include a single original component.

The Cundall Spitfires, allegedly still wrapped in their original Castle Bromwich tar paper, would be the Second World War aircraft devotee’s equivalent of mint Penny Blacks.

There is still scepticism that the Burmese find will yield as many as 20 complete aircraft. There is also the possibility that, if it does, it might lower prices by flooding the market. But few doubt Mr Cundall’s bona fides as a Spitfire hunter, nor the significance of the evidence so far revealed by his ground-penetrating radar.

These Mark XIVs were among the fastest Spitfires ever built. Their Rolls-Royce Griffon engines packed roughly twice the punch of the first Merlin engines used in earlier models (and twice as many horsepower as a modern Bugatti Veyron).

They were normally flown away from the mighty Castle Bromwich plant rather than being crated and loaded on to ships, meaning those buried in Burma have, in car sales parlance, yet to be driven off the forecourt.

It is no small irony that soon after Whitehall decided not to pay to remove the aircraft from Burma, the Burmese and other Asian governments started buying second-hand Spitfires to equip their rudimentary post-war air forces — and British Spitfire pilots took to the skies again to deliver them.

Red Boxes

For departing politicians, it is the ultimate souvenir of their time in the limelight. More than 40 former ministers have paid almost £1,000 each for red ministerial boxes since 2010.

Anyone who has held a ministerial post can buy the distinctive briefcases, which are embossed with their owner’s name and title in gold leaf. A Whitehall source said the practice, which has been going on since the early 1990s, is partly designed to stop the boxes mysteriously disappearing. “There have been very, very naughty instances of boxes going for a walk — usually around election time,” the source said.

Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show that since 2010, seven former ministers in the Foreign Office and Departments of Education and Justice have bought their old boxes. In addition, Barrow & Gale, the London-based manufacturer established in 1750 which makes the briefcases, said that up to 35 others had bought them from it directly, but would not say who or how much they paid.

Dawn Primarolo, who served as Children’s Minister in the previous Labour Government, said that she had decided to buy her box to mark “an incredibly important part of my life”. She bought the briefcase for £850 and said that she thought it was something she could show to her grandchildren. “It’s just a nice box that sits on the bookshelf in my workplace,” she added. “It’s a keepsake for me, just a memento. You can’t use them every day, not unless you want to break your back. They weigh a lot and they’re not very practical.”

Others are more reluctant to reveal whether they have held on to one as a reminder of former glories.

Although the red box is most closely associated with the Treasury, Alistair Darling, the former Chancellor, said that he hadn’t bought one. His predecessor, Gordon Brown, and Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor, couldn’t be reached for comment.

Barrow & Gale is a discreet London-based leather goods company which was established in 1750. The boxes, which weigh up to 3kg, take three days to make. Beneath the red-stained rams’ leather the briefcases are constructed with pine grown in a cold climate to ensure greater durability. They feature a lock placed on the bottom so ministers can’t forget to secure them.

Barrow & Gale has also taken to offering an option for those MPs who have not yet reached the heights of holding a ministerial post. It now produces green “House of Commons” boxes, personalised with an MP’s name and a leather strap in their party colour, for up to £1,350.

Mohammed Suleman, a spokesman for the company, said: that at the last election there were orders for 30 to 35 red souvenir boxes.“It is very nice when ministers come directly to us and acknowledge what we do,” he said. We are always very busy around election and reshuffle time. “We’ve been making these boxes for over 100 years and it is important that it doesn’t become a cottage industry.” Mr Suleman declined to say how much ministers paid for their boxes or who bought them. “Ours is a small and very unique service. We aim always to be very discreet and under the radar. “It’s not a matter of creating an air of mystery, we just want to do the job quietly and we don’t aim to cause any fuss along the way.”

Tanks

Evan Birchfield had long been fascinated by tanks.

So when it came to his 50th birthday, there was only one present that would do.

As it turned out, buying one was the easy bit. The hard bit was sneaking the behemoth into the tiny West Coast town of Ross, where the Birchfield family runs a gold mine.

"There was a bit of stress involved," says Andrew, one of Evan and wife Jane's three sons. He had been searching the world for a Centurion tank. "That was all he used to talk about."

It's quite a gift. Weighing in at 52 tonnes, the tank was first seen in Europe in 1945, arriving a month after hostilities ended. It was England's answer to Germany's much-feared Tiger tank.

Andrew's online search was so fervent that at one stage the US Department of Defence emailed questioning his interest. "They were telling me to stop."

He didn't, and tracked down a Centurion for sale in Australia.

"We flew over there and bought it," he says. Tanks, by the way, cost about $130,000. Deal done, he turned for the airport. "That's when the headaches started."

Andrew had missed the plane. Normally, that's bother enough. But it becomes even more so when your Dad is the boss, a hard taskmaster, and you've bunked off work to buy him a birthday present in another country.

He rang Evan and lied about where he was, saying he was in Christchurch with a broken-down car, and slipped back to work on the next flight.

Then the tank got sent to the wrong port, turning up in Auckland instead of Nelson. Somebody told the television networks a tank was being imported and soon enough a journalist was on the case.

"We were trying to keep everything quiet," says Andrew, but the journalist had tracked down the business somehow. They were dancing around the office, trying to stop Evan, now 61, from answering the phone.

"A couple of times I said to Mum, 'Let's just tell him'. It'd be far less stressful especially when that TV crew started calling."

They managed to throw the media off the scent and get the tank on another ship, this time bound for Nelson, where an alert inspector noticed mud on the underside.

Andrew bunked off work again. "It was hard getting the time off," he recalls. He went up to Nelson, washed the tank and got it on a transporter down to Stillwater, from where it would be smuggled into Ross.

Jane recalls being worried it would be spotted. "They said, 'Don't worry. We'll stick a cover over it and no one will know what it is'."

So there it sat in a yard in Stillwater, under cover with a bloody great turret sticking out the front. "Well, you couldn't miss what it was," says Jane.

Evan, by now, had heard a whisper and the West Coast well knew he was keen on a tank. As Andrew says, "On the West Coast, you only need to fart and everybody knows."

Jane: "People were ringing him and asking, 'Have you got a tank coming into town?'." Early on, she'd dashed his hopes. "If you think you're getting a tank, I want an apartment on the Gold Coast."

It was such a flat response that, when he rang the transporter driver, he happily accepted the explanation the tank was there for some blackpowder gun club event.

They got the tank down to Cemetery Hill, just north of Ross, before off-loading it. Import regulations meant it wasn't allowed into New Zealand with fuel, so there was a bit of a panic finding more when it spluttered, choked and died out in the open.

Evan reckons he "nearly drove over it" that night, but they had his brother lined up to get him into the pub at the time it was delivered. By the time he did go that way, the tank was stashed in a neighbour's haybarn.

It's never simple, keeping a surprise present under wraps. Evan was up the next day with a bulldozer - he's been driving heavy machinery since age 9 - and heading over to the neighbour's place to do some work.

There were tank treads all over the place, so before Evan got there, the neighbour was in his own tractor driving up and down across the property trying to disguise the tracks. "I've got a new dozer," he tells Evan, which was a terrible excuse really.

Then they panicked, because the work Evan was going to do had him driving back and forth in front of the haybarn where the tank was stashed. So, a friend was recruited as a diversion and put in the cab with Evan. Every time their path went near the doors, the friend struck up a conversation with all the usual shouting and hollering that goes on in a bulldozer.

"We tried to keep it quiet but it was pretty hard to hide," says Jane.

But they did. And then came the birthday.

They were out the back of Birchfields Ross Mining, the expansive base of the gold-mining business, when a red car came belting up the road, hell-for-leather. It swung into the business, sliding to a halt and disgorging a cluster of armed men, all dressed like were in the Special Air Service or some special forces unit. "They came flying in there and started firing," says Evan.

Then came the tank.

It clattered along the road, apparently chasing the SAS guys, who turned their fire on the tank, like they were fighting for their lives. The tank, impregnable, turned into the yard, bore down on the birthday celebrations and rolled straight over the top of the red car.

Andrew says: "We could only run over half of the car because the guy who owned it wanted the engine."

Out popped the opposing force, dressed in a West Coasters' view of what terrorists might wear in 2002, the year after the World Trade Centre attacks. Broadly speaking, it's Middle Eastern.

"I was an Arab," says Andrew. "I was driving it. I got shot."

The SAS team conquered the tank. Evan said: "Then the SAS guys dragged all the Arabs out." The "terrorists" were held at gunpoint and many photographs were taken.

As for the car, the attempt to save the engine didn't work out so well. "It ended up getting smashed up later in the night after a few cordials," says Andrew.

Evan had a good night. "Understandably," he says, "I never went to bed."

Jane did, but woke about 4am. She says she looked out the window, next to where the party was being held, and saw Evan standing there, just staring at the tank. She watched for some time, initially thinking he was alone, then noticed a few other people still up. She watched and he didn't move, just stood there and stared at his tank.

Then, at first light, she was woken again when Evan started up the tank.

"Here we go," she thought. And off he went.

And for a few years, that was the pattern. He doesn't drive over cars anymore: "I got one stuck in the tread and it dug up under the mudguard."

There had been other lessons too. "I went through a house one day. I didn't realise it would break so much stuff off."

Eventually, there were repairs needed. "I went over to Aussie to get some parts for the one I had," says Evan.

The man with the parts said: "Have a look in the shed." And there was a tank. "It's for sale, too," said the man.

Evan wrung out his words with a fair dose of exasperation.

"Hell, don't tell me that," he said.

So that's two tanks. "That's our anti-aircraft gun in the shed there," he says, driving past a chunk of weaponry mounted on the back of a flatbed truck. "That's in case we get a tank coming at us from the air."

Evan was born in Grey Valley, where his dad had a contracting business. Evan started young, helping out with his father's business. The old Bedford truck: he can remember barely being able to touch the pedals.

The work just "dried up overnight" in the 1980s, he says. That was when they moved to Ross and began goldmining. There's a lot of regulation to work through. You ask him about tanks, and he says: "I drove a bulldozer for years and I always thought dealing with some of these public officials, a tank might be more useful."

There were a few people mining at the time and enough work for everyone. It created a collegial environment, he says, in which knowledge and innovation was shared.

The Birchfield business is alluvial mining, using water to separate gold from soil - a sort of massive gold-panning operation. He's aware it's not a universally popular way to make a living. "There's a segment of the community who really hate us with a vengeance."

The company started small but now employs 35 people. The business is a large part of Ross, with many employees able to buy houses in the town. They get well paid, says Evan.

"I can spend millions of dollars on machines but if I don't have good people on them I might as well not bother."

The goldmining business is all-consuming. "You can't have a hobby. If I had a boat or set of golf clubs I'd never use it."

If anything, Evan's hobby is mischief. One day he decided he'd like a dragon. "So we built one," he says. He waves a hand past the workshops and sheds to the back of the yard. "That's its head over there."

Sure enough, it's a dragon and a decent size. Amazing what a man with inclination, and a workshop for heavy machinery, can accomplish.

They call it the Ross Ness Monster and it made its debut when Evan and Jane's son Paul went fishing.

They knew where and when he would be casting a line. The dragon was submerged in the lake, with air canisters on remote control.

Once Paul was settled in, they activated the gas canisters and up floated the dragon, its head quietly breaking the surface just next to the small rowboat.

Paul pretty much flew for the shore. Evan cracks up, his arms are moving at a blur, miming a freaked-out Paul rowing so fast he's flying through the air. "He's in the middle of the air, rowing for the shore."

That was when the tank emerged through the undergrowth. A huge BOOM roared out as pyrotechnics in the barrel ignited, and then there was a BAM as a matching charge went off in the dragon's head.

Oh yes, says Evan: "It's good to have a second childhood."

Iceland's Penis Museum

If you ask Icelander Sigurður “Siggi” Hjartarson, the founder of the world’s only phallological—yes, penis—museum, why he’s spent 40-plus years collecting almost 300 different animal phalluses and “penile parts,” his answer is simple: “Well, somebody had to do this.”

He’s not sure why anyone would be weirded out by what he calls the “new science” of phallology. His museum has specimens from the tiny (a hamster, at two millimeters in length) and the large (17 whale penises and counting, one measuring nearly six feet); the ordinary (as ordinary as polar bears and gorillas, anyway) and the mythical (Icelandic elf, troll, and merman phalluses are on display). He has lampshades made from bull scrotums and silver penis sculptures of the Iceland men’s handball team. He even has wooden, penis-shaped phones, mini-bars, and cutlery sets that he carved himself.

“It’s mainly Americans who are squeamish about this,” Hjartarson says over the phone from his home in Iceland. “Maybe at first people were astonished and thought that I was queer or something was wrong with me—but on the whole, it has been pretty successful and the reaction has been good.” Sure, he may be “a wee bit eccentric or whatever” (his words), but his family and the people around him have always been onboard with the collection. In fact, it was his wife, to whom he’s been married for more than fifty years, who suggested he open a museum in the first place. In 1997, twenty-three years after a teacher gave Hjartarson, then headmaster, a bull’s penis cattle whip as a joke, the Icelandic Phallological Museum opened its doors.

But among the hundreds of organs floating in formaldehyde jars and jutting out from wooden mounts on the walls, one specimen was always clearly missing from Hjartarson’s collection: a human penis.

Hjartarson, now 73, and his quest to obtain the ultimate, human addition to his museum’s collection is the subject of Jonah Bekhor and Zach Math’s documentary, The Final Member, which is being released in select theaters on Friday. The film follows Hjartarson and two men—one an aging, famed Icelandic playboy and the other a middle-aged, well-endowed American—in a “race” to see who gets their man bits immortalized in the museum’s vacant “human” jar. All three are wildly colorful characters, making for situations as funny—and punny—as you’d expect. (Guess what the museum’s largest specimen is? A sperm whale! And the official slogan printed on the doors? “It’s all about Dicks.”)

Guess what the museum’s largest specimen is? A sperm whale! And the official slogan printed on the doors? “It’s all about Dicks.” The Final Member unabashedly dissects why penis talk is uncomfortable for so many: "We look at the historical record and see all kinds of variations in how much we can talk openly about penises. It’s odd that we, in the 21st century, tend to fall in a very conservative point of view,” Mitchell B. Morris, a professor of Cultural History at UCLA, says in the film. And it sympathetically conveys each character’s more universal preoccupation: All three men, above all else, just want to be remembered after they die.

95-year-old pioneer Pall Arason—the first man to organize tours to the Icelandic highlands, as well as a renowned womanizer who loved bragging about his “outstanding sexual performances”—passed away in 2011, giving his penis, testicles and scrotum dibs on the jar that is now the museum’s centerpiece. Tom Mitchell, a thrice-divorced Californian obsessed with his own penis—as in, he named it Elmo, tattooed the tip with stars and stripes, and makes costumes for it, which you can gaze upon in all their Viking, wizard, cowboy, and astronaut glory here —was understandably saddened by the news. To beat Arason to the punch, he had planned to have Elmo surgically removed, flown to Iceland, displayed in a special case he designed himself, then returned to his home during the museum’s off-season. But losing his chance to be the museum’s first human member hasn’t stopped him from pursuing a comic book deal in which his schlong stars as a flying, caped superhero.

The documentary ends with the installation of Arason’s penis, greeted with flashing cameras and a beaming Hjartarson. But Hjartarson lets on that there were a few things the film left out.

He was less than satisfied with Arason’s shriveled remains, for one. “His organ had shrunk quite a bit,” Hjartarson says. “Unfortunately, the process of preservation wasn’t successful at all.” Issues with transferring Arason’s remains into the jar of formaldehyde resulted in a gray, wrinkly, mostly unrecognizable mass. It could potentially be replaced with Hjartarson’s own penis, but that may not happen. “The problem is, I’m getting old and I’m shrinking like Mr. Arason,” he says. “So I’m not sure that my son [Hjörtur Gísli Sigurðsson, who took over as curator of the museum two years ago] would like me when the time comes!”

Hjartarson also admits that he doesn’t approve of the way The Final Member ultimately portrayed the acquisition of Arason’s member. “I didn’t know, and they deceived me, or went behind my back, in the way that they never told me that they would put this film up as a ‘race’ between Tom Mitchell and Mr. Arason,” he says. “There was some, well, scheming. I had got Mr. Arason’s [penis] for five months before it was announced to the public that I had got it. That was just for these filmmakers to go on with the play, or the show of some competition between Mr. Arason and Mr. Mitchell. I was not altogether happy about this, but that’s not my job. This is their film and not mine and I just hope they have some success with the film.”

Despite the problems, Hjartarson remains mostly Zen as he awaits whatever is next for the museum—whether it comes in his lifetime or not. Since the documentary was filmed, he has received offers from a German photographer, Peter Christmann, and an English TV personality, John Dower, who both are willing to donate their penises to the museum after they die. Neither is very old (Christmann is in his early 40s and Dower in his 30s), but Hjartarson is in no hurry. “We just wait and our time will come,” he says.”You never know. People die at all ages, you know? We are not stressed by this. Just keep your ears and eyes open and be quick when opportunity comes.”

Vinyl

On the 65th birthday of the 45rpm record, vinyl remains in rude health — not just as a music format but also an investment opportunity for the shrewd fan.

The sale of vinyl hit its highest level for 15 years in 2013, with more than a million records sold — a 101 per cent rise on the previous year. Meanwhile, Record Store Day, the annual celebration of independent music stores, takes place next Saturday and each year several bands and record labels put out special, limited edition vinyl for the occasion. For fans this presents a unique opportunity to not only buy some rare music, but also to make a purchase that could appreciate tenfold over a decade. Phil Barton, the owner of the Sister Ray record store in Soho, explains: “In 2004, a mint copy of King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King was worth about £50 and now it’s £500. The Who’s My Generation has gone from £150-£200 to £800-£1,000, the Sex Pistols’ EMI version of Anarchy in the UK from £20 to £300.”

One reason for such a spectacular growth in prices, according to Spencer Hickman, UK co-ordinator for Record Store Day, is the advent of the CD, which led to people discarding their record collections en masse. “Since CDs happened, people got rid of vinyl — you would see it in skips — so a lot of the original pressing didn’t make it through.” The ones that did can now fetch a tidy sum, because “it just so happened that through the years fewer and fewer have come up for sale”.

The rarest records can command staggering prices. Last year a rare blues record, Alcohol And Jake Blues / Ridin’ Horse by Tommy Johnson, recorded in 1929, sold for $37,100 on eBay. Earlier this year, a sealed copy of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here changed hands for £9,000. If you are hoping to unearth a rare gem from the catalogue of Record Store Day releases — or in the bargain bin at your local charity shop — Mr Barton says the first thing to do is to make sure it’s in excellent condition.

“Always get the best quality, and if you are buying second-hand then get as near mint as possible,” he says. “That applies to the record, not just the cover — both elements have to be as mint as possible, because those records will increase in value more than the rest.

“If you’re buying new records, buy two copies — one to keep in mint condition and one to play. Mint means never played, everything else is not in mint condition.

“Collect the bands that people will always want, such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, and so on. It’s much harder to predict which records of today’s releases are going to be worth money in coming years.”

Novices should be careful not to assume that everything coming out on Record Store Day is going to be valuable. “There are so many products there that it will be a tricky business to pick out the best ones,” warns Mr Hickman. The best thing is to buy the music you love and want to listen to. Records are an investment, and you will always be able to sell them. In charity shops you can still pick up fantastic records for a lot less than what they’re worth — it’s the thrill of the hunt, because you don’t know what you’ll find.”

Wine Forgeries

In 2006, Atlanta wine collector Julian LeCraw Jr. paid $91,400 for a single bottle of 1787 Château d’Yquem, at the time the most ever for a white wine. That purchase, while stunning, was dwarfed in both size and renown by that of one Christopher Forbes, who bid £105,000 (some $157,000) in 1985 for a 1787 Château Lafite etched with the initials “Th.J.,” and advertised as formerly belonging to Thomas Jefferson. The landmark sale inspired other ambitious collectors, including billionaire business tycoon Bill Koch, to seek out their own Jeffersonian wine. In late 1988, Koch spent about half a million dollars to add four of the famed bottles to his personal cellar.

The world of elite wine collecting, as such purchases demonstrate, is an expensive and high-stakes hunting game. Connoisseurs such as Koch, for whom the money is no object, will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on rarities that promise to enhance their collections. But as prices for these bottles have soared, so has another risk—one that LeCraw and Koch both discovered the hard way. The most esteemed and alluring of bottles just might turn out to be fake.

While experts agree that it’s hard to size up the impact of forgery on the wine industry, a recent spate of busts has shone a spotlight on how pervasive the problem might be. This past October, European police arrested seven people in connection with an international counterfeiting ring that sold 400 bottles of fake Romanée-Conti wine, among the world’s most expensive, for more than 2 million euros ($2.7 million). A few months earlier, police in China arrested more than 10 suspects linked to millions of dollars in fake wine sales after uncovering counterfeiting equipment in a raid. LeCraw is suing the seller of his bogus bottle, Antique Wine Co., for $25 million. And in December, a federal jury convicted famed rare wines dealer Rudy Kurniawan of peddling tens of millions of dollars of homebrewed mixes with sham labels.

“Making forgeries of wine bottles, unfortunately, is really not all that difficult and time-consuming, especially since one could assume that making a ‘spot-on’ counterfeit watch would be much more difficult and time-consuming,” says Mark Solomon, the wine director at Leland Little Auction & Estate Sales and CEO of TrueBottle.com, an online database for wine collectors.

Some forgers will print their own labels to alter cheap bottles; others will buy empties of the best years and makes, then refill them with other wines. That means the glass bottles themselves can also fetch substantial sums. The empty bottle of a prized 1982 Château Lafite Rothschild might alone fetch $1,500. “But if you go to 1983 or 1981,” Solomon says, “the price of the bottle is a fraction of what an ’82 goes for.” A clever forger might therefore alter the last digit of the date, refill the bottle, and sell it for several multiples of what the empty cost.

Wine forgeries are as easy to pull off as they are hard to weed out. The bottles are rarely sold directly to auction houses, instead winding their way into collectors’ cellars through a series of sales, where they can hide among dozens of authentic bottles. And while the easiest way to check whether or not your 1982 Château Lafite Rothschild is the real deal might be to taste what’s inside, you can hardly pop the cork off a rare vintage before it goes up for bidding.

Charles Curtis, a Master of Wine and former head of wine for Christie’s in both Asia and the Americas, explains that authenticating wine begins with contacting the owner to request any documentation (receipts and so on). Next comes a physical inspection of the bottle. Experts check the capsule, cork, label, and glass to see if the materials are consistent with the stated time and place of production, if the branding is consistent, and if any of the pieces show signs of tampering. An examiner can also use a high-powered flashlight to examine the cork through the bottle and see if the wine itself is the correct color and contains the proper amount of sediment for its age.

“It is seldom possible to establish authenticity with 100 percent accuracy,” Curtis tells me, “but these methods normally give enough evidence to form a credible opinion of authenticity.”

So how to get at the problem of checking the wine itself? One method has been to enlist carbon dating to approximate the age of the liquid in a bottle, but this can prove imprecise. Instead of looking for carbon, a variation on this approach searches for the isotope cesium-137, an artificial form of radioactivity that was created through nuclear testing and is therefore not present in wines bottled before the advent of such technology. The isotope is absorbed from the soil by the roots of grapevines, and gets locked into the bottle during the winemaking process. Bill Koch’s camp famously sought out Philippe Hubert, a French physicist who had experimented with cesium-137 testing, to have one of his alleged Jeffersonian bottles tested in a lab beneath the Alps on the French-Italian border.

Another answer, which doesn’t require traveling to a remote section of the Alps, may have been found in a device that’s emerged in just the last year. It’s called the Coravin System, and it uses science to do magic—namely, to extract wine from a bottle without removing or even damaging the cork. Coravin is the fanciest corkscrew you’ve ever seen, with a sleek upright design that lets it sit in its holder like a tiny rocket waiting to launch. The creation of medical device inventor Greg Lambrecht, it works by passing a fine, hollow needle through the cork. The bottle is pressurized with argon, an inert gas, that pushes the wine into tiny holes on the side of the needle and out through the device, into your glass.

“The cork is elastic - it’s actually one of the most elastic solids we’ve ever discovered in nature,” Lambrecht says. “I’d made medical needles that did very little damage to the things they went through, so the insight was, ‘Hey, I could use this to get through the cork.’”

Coravin retails for $299 and, for the moment, has two main markets: home consumers and people who sell wine for business (restaurants, distributors, etc.). Coravin allows them to pour or sell a single glass without setting off a ticking oxidation clock that can turn the best of wine into something resembling vinegar. Lambrecht’s initial idea for the device came about because he wanted to keep drinking good wine a glass at a time while his wife was pregnant, and needed a way to preserve the remainder of the bottle.

In a market besieged by fraud and chicanery, could Coravin be the solution? Maybe. Using Coravin to sample a wine prior to a sale would have to be disclosed at auction and could potentially devalue the bottle. But far more problematic is this simple fact: Lots of people don’t know what old wine is supposed to taste like. “People may taste a bottle of genuine old wine that’s matured and may not like the flavors,” Curtis says. “There are some tasters who are superb judges of such matters, and there are others who are not.” Wine tasting, after all, is subjective. For all but the most refined of palates, it has to do as much with what we think of a bottle as what we know. If we think a wine is expensive—and forgers think they know we think that - chances are it will taste that way, too.

Plane Spotters

“We couldn’t give a fuck about Obama,” Luke Amundsen says as he stares through a car windshield toward a taxiing Qantas jet. “We just want to take photos of his airplane.”

It’s a horribly windy Friday morning in mid-July at Brisbane Airport, situated 10 miles northeast from the third biggest city in Australia. Amundsen and Simon Coates are sitting in the cabin of a silver Holden Commodore while commercial aircraft alternately take off and touch down. “If there was a private jet due in, we’d come out here just for that,” says Coates. “We don’t care who’s on it — we just want the jet.”

He switches on a dashboard radio unit, which picks up staccato blasts of aviation jargon from the nearby control tower. “…Qantas 950 two-five-zero degrees, three-zero knots — cleared to land,” says a calm male voice. Amundsen exhales, impressed. “Three-zero knots!” he says. “That’s a decent wind.”

Amundsen is a tall 28-year-old, with facial stubble and short, spiked brown hair. He’s the more enthusiastic of the pair. Coates, also 28, plays it much cooler: His eyes are hidden behind sunglasses, and his responses are more measured. He maintains the Brisbane Airport Movements blog, while Amundsen helps run a Facebook page, Brisbane Aircraft Spotting, which has around 6,000 fans. Together, the two have also invested tens of thousands of dollars and a year of their lives in the development of a new website, Global Aircraft Images, which seeks to challenge established spotter-friendly communities such as Airliners.net and Planespotters.net.

While we sit facing the tarmac — the second busiest single airport runway in the world, after London’s Gatwick — a news van glides past. “They must be out here for the Malaysian thing,” says Coates, before turning to me. “Did you hear about the Malaysian that went down?” It’s July 18, 2014, the day that news breaks of MH17’s wreckage being scattered across the Ukrainian countryside. Amundsen reveals that he has flown on that destroyed Malaysia Airlines plane, while Coates has flown on MH370, the one that went missing in March. They know this because they both keep records of every flight they’ve ever taken.

“We’re pretty serious about it,” Amundsen continues. “At home, Simon and I have got ADS-B receivers; with those, on our computer screens at home, we can virtually see exactly what the air traffic controllers can see. If something unusual pops up on our radar screen, that’ll usually give us half an hour to get out here and catch it.” (Neither of them can recall what ADS-B stands for, so Coates googles it: Automatic Dependent Surveillance — Broadcast.) A plane-tracking website named FlightRadar24 feeds off these receivers. Coates opens the app on his phone, which shows a bunch of tiny yellow icons overlaid on a map. “You can see all the planes buzzing around,” he says.

“This app runs off people’s home feeds,” Admundsen explains.

We meet at what’s known as “The Loop” — one end of Acacia Street, which borders Brisbane Airport and offers the best runway-side sight lines for spotters, including a raised concrete viewing platform. At age 15, Amundsen began learning to fly at flight school; a year later, he was flying a skydiving plane for fun and profit, and by 19 he had obtained his commercial pilot license. He has clocked over 3,000 hours in the cockpits of airplanes and helicopters. Coates is employed by the Qantas Group too, as a ground handling agent here at Brisbane Airport — a job that, he says with a smile, involves “passenger marshaling, boarding flights, standing out on the apron, getting high on aviation fuel every day.” He jokes that he has logged over 800 “backseat hours” on commercial flights.

Through the windshield, we watch a red-tailed Boeing 747 take off. “See, there we go, he’s off to Singapore,” says Amundsen, pointing. “He’s up nice and early.”

“Very early variation,” says Coates, admiring the steep ascent.

“That’s, like, a QF8 rotation. He’s got awesome headwind. The wind’s coming from the south, and going over the wing.” They know the Qantas jet is heading to Singapore because it ascended so sharply. “There’s two [Qantas] 747s,” says Amundsen. “One goes to L.A., one goes to Singapore. The L.A. one goes out a hell of a lot heavier; it would have over 100 tons of fuel on board. That would only have about 60,” he says, pointing again at the now-distant aircraft, growing smaller by the second.

Amundsen knows these routes and schedules particularly well, as he lives nearby. “If I could live closer, I would,” he says. “I can be lying in bed at midnight and hear the Emirates 777 come over, and know exactly what it is, straightaway. I don’t even have to look up.”

Amundsen’s comment about the presidential plane arises as the pair discuss the upcoming G20 summit in November. These two will be among the crowd attempting to gather somewhere near this airport, cameras in hand, searching the skies for Air Force One in the hope of capturing a once-in-a-lifetime event: the president of the United States of America landing at their home airport. An intense Australian Federal Police presence surrounding the miles of wire fences day and night for the duration of the summit mean that shooting Air Force One is an unlikely event indeed. But still, the possibility is there.

And possibility is what drives planespotters — otherwise known as “jetrosexuals,” “aerosexuals,” and “cloud bunnies” — a niche group of obsessives whose intense interest in flight paths, travel schedules, and colorful jet livery occasionally overlaps with the concerns of the general population.

When Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 vanished on March 8, 2014, planespotting had its best chance at making a mainstream impact. While millions combed satellite images online to look for signs of wreckage, a 32-year old designer and filmmaker based in Jersey City, New Jersey, named Michael Raisch had a different approach: to collaborate with global planespotters and create a visual tribute to the aircraft. Raisch searched MH370’s tail number — 9M-MRO — and emailed around 80 spotters who had photographed the plane. Raisch says, “I had the simple thought, ‘You captured this little thing that’s gone, it’s not coming back, no one can take this picture again — how do you feel?’”

Ultimately, 22 spotters from around the world replied and offered Raisch shots they had taken from 2004 to February 2014. His tribute functioned as a kind of eulogy for the physical aircraft, and it struck a chord, attracting 120,000 visitors in the month after its publication on March 30. “The planespotters gave us a human connection to this missing plane, and I think that’s why it went viral,” Raisch says.

To seasoned sky spies like Amundsen and Coates, such headlines are viewed as sideline attractions rather than the main event. Rather than chasing the loudest sirens and smoldering wreckage, theirs is a process of passion — they show up day after day, week after week, and cast their eyes toward the runway. But since September 2001, any pastime involving the close scrutiny of commercial aircraft cannot be seen as wholly innocent.

In front of our parked car are a father and son, lying in the back of their four-wheel drive to escape the wind, doing exactly the same thing as we are. Later, Amundsen says, “I just broke up with my missus, mate. That’s a good thing, you know? I reckon spotting was more important than her!”

Coates cackles. “Amen to that!”

While modern planespotting may appear to some as a rather strange and tedious way to spend free time, the hobby has its roots in the serious business of wartime watchfulness. During World War II, British and American governments distributed cards to citizens that included illustrations showing the differences between Allied and Axis aircraft, so that those with their eyes to the sky could determine whether to wave patriotically or seek cover from incoming ordnance.

Nowadays, a search for planespotting on YouTube returns over a million results, and the most popular video has been viewed over 7.5 million times. It was uploaded in August 2013 by an account named TheGreatFlyer, run by Demetris Gregoriou, who lives in Nicosia, the capital of the European island nation of Cyprus. He is 17 years old.

Titled “Low Landings and Jetblasts – A Plane Spotting Movie,” the four-minute clip was filmed on the small Greek island of Skiathos, where enormous jets land on a beach-approach runway that spans the entire width of part of the tiny tourist paradise and allows spotters to get unusually up close and personal. Gregoriou makes a pilgrimage there every year. “People cannot believe I spend eight days [on] such a beautiful island, all of them by the end of the runway,” he says. The young filmmaker describes Skiathos as “the second St. Maarten,” in reference to another famously low-altitude runway at Princess Juliana International Airport, on the Caribbean island, which acts as a magnet for the global planespotting community and curious tourists alike.

Near the beginning of the video, a sign warns DANGER: PLEASE KEEP AWAY FROM AIRCRAFT BLAST, yet Gregoriou captures on film plenty of sandal-wearing enthusiasts attempting to hold onto a steel fence while they’re buffeted by high-speed winds, sand, and debris. At one point, a man attempts to let go, only to collapse on his knees in the middle of the road as the wind roars through his hair. At another, a slow-motion replay of an Air Italy 737 seems to show its wheels missing the fence by inches. “Many consider planespotting a rather boring sport,” Gregoriou says. “They always get impressed after watching my videos.”

One of the most popular videos uploaded by a user named Dantorp Aviation is a 31-minute “wingview” video of a British Airways 747-400 taking off from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. The footage is taken from a single camera, filming the aircraft pushing off from the aerobridge and taxiing to the runway, while passengers and crew chatter in the background. The video essentially shows modern air travel in all its minutiae, including the standard in-flight warnings that smoking is not permitted, and that passengers are required to switch off their phones.

“When I talk to the average person about my YouTube channel, they’re like, ‘What, people actually watch that?’” says Dantorp, the alias of 17-year-old Daniel G., who is based in Gothenburg, Sweden. (He requested that his surname not be used.) Since being uploaded in September 2013, that video has received over 630,000 views, and, all told, Dantorp’s 290-odd aviation videos have been viewed nearly 10 million times. But…why? “I wish I knew,” he says with a laugh. “Apart from the airport, YouTube is the closest to aviation you can get.”

Brian Futterman compares the adrenaline rush of planespotting to what a hunter might feel while stalking a wild animal, or what a groupie might experience when chasing their favorite band. “It’s hard to explain to those who haven’t felt it,” explains the 26-year-old commercial pilot based in Charlottesville, Virginia, who grew up in Queens, New York, and whose ideal weekends as a teenager involved spotting takeoffs and arrivals at LaGuardia or JFK. “It took me a while to realize that I had a different adolescence — less clubbing and underage drinking and trying to be mischievous, [and more] waking up at 5 a.m. and taking $2,500 in camera gear with a 35-year-old friend to watch the new Thai Airways A340-500 arrival at JFK.”

Yet despite the hobby’s innocence, Futterman is aware that those who choose to spend their time along airport fences naturally attract wariness. “The plight of the community for the past 13 years has been to insist our value and our benign nature to the authorities and the public,” he says. “If there’s a team of 20 guys at an airport pointing these big lenses, sometimes people think they’re RPGs [rocket-propelled grenade launchers]. They’d make up some laws about trespassing, tell us it’s illegal to take pictures of airlines.”

He recalled one particular incident as a teenager when, a few hours after his dad dropped him and a friend off for spotting, an airport security officer shooed them into his office, demanding they be picked up.

“PLANESPOTTING MUST BE ONE OF THE MOST ECCENTRIC HOBBIES KNOWN TO MANKIND, BUT IT IS NOT AN INDICATION OF ILL WILL OR A THREAT,” FUMED ONE BRITISH FOREIGN MINISTER.

“Looking through the pictures on my camera, including one sweet shot of a Delta 767-400 — like, the biggest airplane to come into the airport — I was told to delete everything and advised to ‘get a real hobby, like baseball cards or something,’” Futterman remembers. “[My] friend cried. I was pissed. Cocksuckers.”

This kind of intense suspicion isn’t unique to the United States. In 2001, 12 British and two Dutch planespotters visiting a military base in Greece were imprisoned by Greek officials for five weeks on charges of espionage, causing a protracted and tense diplomatic dispute in the European Union. “Planespotting must be one of the most eccentric hobbies known to mankind, but it is not an indication of ill will or a threat,” fumed one British foreign minister.

Even as a licensed pilot, Futterman says there have been occasions when he has been admonished by airport security for taking pictures of planes during his downtime. “It’s kind of like not being allowed in a restaurant to look at the menu unless you’re definitely going to eat there,” he says. “And you’re the chef.”

Phil Derner, an air traffic dispatcher for a major airline, knows this well, having been detained by police twice in his life while photographing planes at airports. “Around here in New York, it’s 50-50. If someone walks past and looks at you, smile and give a wave, and a ‘Hey, how are you?’ They’ll usually think, OK, that’s a weird person.”

Like Futterman, Derner grew up in Queens, across from LaGuardia, and his upbringing was filled with views of smoky 1980s jetliners from his third-floor window. Now 33, he has owned and operated NYCAviation.com, one of the world’s most popular aviation enthusiast hubs, for over a decade. By coincidence, when we speak, it’s Aug. 19, the 75th National Aviation Day — a significant event on the annual calendar of a plane-centric website like NYCAviation. “It’s not a holiday,” says Derner with a smile, “but it’s where I feel we can actively celebrate aviation, and raise a glass and toast to it.”

He regularly spends 16 hours a day working on the website, which has a staff of 11. On the wall behind his desk are two large global navigation charts, which show international airways, as well as a photo of his partner in NYCAviation, Matt Molnar, who died of a cardiac arrest in January 2013. Derner has also posted handwritten index cards of inspirational quotes, including one from JetBlue CEO Dave Barger (“What got us here won’t get us there”).

“The more that I learn about everything that goes on behind the scenes,” he says, “the stronger the appreciation that I have for the technology that allows flight, the people who spend their time to make aviation safe and who celebrate the fact the human species can defy gravity like that. It’s the craziest way to transport yourself, yet it’s the safest.”

NYCAviation covers what Derner dubs “aviation enthusiasm” in its broadest sense, in the name of demystifying air travel to those who primarily think of it as stressful, or dangerous, or annoying; planespotters are its most enthusiastic subset. And that enthusiasm manifests itself as a bunch of people standing along airport perimeters, waiting.

“In a lot of ways, it’s like fishing,” Derner says. “A lot of it is about the people in the fishing boat with you, and shooting a certain plane is like catching a big fish.”

Catches don’t come much bigger than the one landed by 54-year-old Spaniard Josep Manchado one day in late January 2000 while spotting at his local airport, Palma de Mallorca. Manchado snapped a few frames of a Boeing 737 jet that was unattended. Upon returning home, he uploaded his best image to Airliners.net, and forgot about it. Six months later, Manchado received an email from a reporter at a German television station, ZDF, asking to corroborate a story described by a source, who alleged that he was kidnapped on this particular aircraft. “They wanted to count the steps on the stairs to the plane,” says Manchado, “because the Arab man counted the steps into the plane while he was wearing a blindfold.”

This “Arab man” — actually a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri — alleged that the plane took him from Skopje, Macedonia, through Palma, Spain’s third largest airport, to a CIA black site in Afghanistan, where he was then interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, sodomized, and tortured by the United States government as part of what was later known as its extraordinary rendition program. The program began in the mid-1990s but intensified following the 9/11 attacks. Josep Manchado’s photograph of the aircraft was a crucial piece of the puzzle that allowed investigative journalists to corroborate details of el-Masri’s story, and thus provided the first concrete proof of this practice.

“On one side, I was very proud to help discover all these military flights of the CIA, because I think it’s a terrible action,” says Manchado. In the years between publishing that seemingly innocuous photograph and the rendition program coming to light, the Spaniard received plenty of media requests for his fortuitous photograph, as well as some shady-sounding questions from people in the United States asking for his identification and Social Security number, which Manchado refused to provide.

Some of his friends in the tight-knit spotting community surrounding Palma de Mallorca airport warned Manchado that he might be disappeared by the CIA for his actions. He admits having some anxiety when he next visited the United States. “I was worried when they put my name in the computers, but I got in no problem,” he says. However, Spanish authorities subsequently revoked runway access to planespotters.

In April, a New York Times journalist, Thomas Erdbrink, happened to look out the window at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran and notice a tiny American flag on the tail of a corporate jet. Despite President Obama’s warnings that the central Middle Eastern hub was not open for business, here was evidence to the contrary, it seemed: The Bombardier jetliner powered by two General Electric engines was owned by the Bank of Utah, which is listed as a trustee for 1,169 aircraft, according to the Federal Aviation Administration’s database.

Although a follow-up report solved this mystery by showing that the plane had been leased by a Ghanaian mining company owned by a brother of the West African country’s president, Erdbrink’s canny smartphone snap was a fine example of the unwritten credo of being in the right place at the right time, to which many amateur spotters adhere.

While Manchado’s and Erdbrink’s discoveries were accidental, some planespotters intentionally seek out this kind of intrigue. “Eugene,” who has asked not to be identified, is in his late fifties, and works as an engineer in the Bay Area. He has no interest in the comparatively pedestrian, civilian efforts of men like Luke Amundsen, Simon Coates, and Josep Manchado. “There are people that go to the airport and photograph everything,” he tells me via email. “Imagine sitting by the side of the road and photographing cars: Chevy, Ford, Chevy, Toyota.”

Eugene contrasts this against his preferred type of spotting, which involves photographing military air traffic: For example, from Coyote Summit, a favorite spot of his in Nevada. A page on his website features remarkable photos of Air Force hardware captured from the summit in midair, including a B1-B Lancer in steep ascent. “First of all, there’s no landing gear showing,” he writes. “This is the difference between photographing animals in the zoo — the airport — versus in the wild. When the B1-B was flying by, I was the only person on the hill. But go to the fence at Nellis [Air Force Base, south Nevada], and there are probably two dozen photographers all taking the same shots.”

I ask what constitutes “big game.” “They have to be test aircraft,” he replies. “I’m more into black projects, and Groom Lake stuff,” referring to the home of Area 51, the highly secretive military base in Nevada.

Nuisance plays some part in Eugene’s motivations, as despite the fact that the U.S. military would probably prefer that its prototype aircraft were kept hidden, he maintains that photography “is not a crime. Hence if they are annoyed or not is irrelevant.”

On a Saturday morning at Brisbane Airport’s spotting base, I meet with three more aircraft enthusiasts: Lance Broad, 31, who manages a supermarket, and his partner Sarah Duggan, 25, as well as Beau Chenery, a 26-year-old freelance IT contractor. Broad and Chenery are co-administrators of the YBBN Spotters Group on Facebook, which has nearly 4,500 fans. Broad, who has a shaved head, dark eyes, and a blue Boeing jumper, used to be into surf photography. “A friend brought me to The Loop five years ago, and I was hooked,” he says. “Now all I shoot is aviation. This is harder; it’s all got to be preplanned.”

As we talk near the fence, a small group of spotters — all men — are taking photos from the concrete viewing platform. A couple of them have brought stepladders, so that the wire fence isn’t in their shots. A Qantas Boeing 767 with colorful cartoon livery based on the Disney film Planes taxis past for takeoff. Duggan waves at the pilot, who returns her gesture. Broad smiles and asks how she feels; beaming, she replies, “I feel special!”

I ask whether she was interested in planes before she met Lance. “No,” she replies, laughing. During the hour that we spend at The Loop on this bright morning, I spot four women, including Sarah. All of them are here with their partners.

“Brisbane Airport Corporation sees us as stakeholders; we know what’s right and wrong,” says Chenery, arms crossed and wearing sunglasses to fend off the glare. “The Australian Federal Police views us as a legitimate community group.” “We embrace them,” echoes Leonie Vandeven, media and marketing communications manager at Brisbane Airport Corporation. “There’s no harm in watching planes. They’re extra eyes, they’re considerate, and they’re essentially advocates for the airport. They’re part of the family.”

Last year, BAC threw a “plane party” for the local spotters here at The Loop, which was attended by nearly 100 people. BAC provided free tacos and invited a few guest speakers, including the Australian Federal Police. Vandeven, 41, gives a cheeky smile. “Spotters are committed, man. They’re out there with their flasks of soup and tea.”

The symbiotic relationship that Brisbane Airport has with its small group of local spotters is atypical, but not an anomaly. “Miami International even set up several holes in the fence by the runway specifically to fit lenses,” says Futterman. “That’s a planespotter’s utopia, where hassle is nil and access is unfettered.”

Since 2011, Brisbane Airport has existed as a suburb in its own right. As airside operations manager, it’s Peter Dunlop’s responsibility to oversee everything that goes on inside the fence — 16 miles of bitumen roads that his staff patrols 24/7. The airport averages 600 plane “movements” per day, of aircraft either arriving at or departing from its domestic and international terminals, which together service 26 airlines flying to 67 destinations.

“We have a good relationship with our spotters,” Dunlop says, while steering a white utility vehicle onto one of the airport’s many taxiways. “It’s not like we’re inundated with requests every day; there’s a community of around a hundred people, and you might only ever see 30 or 40 of them at one time. We try and help them where we can.” They take some of the local spotters on occasional airside tours — like the one I’m on — to offer them unique photography opportunities, to thank them for their unceasing devotion. In exchange for access, the airport reserves the right to use any particularly striking photos in its own marketing materials. It’s a quid pro quo that many of the spotters seem to view as a great honor. After all, it’s better to be inside the fence than out.

Dunlop steers the vehicle toward the maintenance hangars, which are hidden away from public view. He edges us toward a hangar that’s usually closed. Through a crack in the door, we see a private helicopter and jet in repose. His curiosity sated, we return to the taxiways. “Keep an eye out for FOD,” he says. “That’s ‘foreign object debris.’ We don’t want anything that can be sucked into an engine.” He smiles, then something catches his eye. He brings the vehicle to an abrupt stop, pulls on the hand brake, and steps outside, returning with a grin on his face and a small metal screw. “That could cost somebody hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to an engine,” he says. “They’re not always that easy to see.”

We pass the waterfront overlooking Moreton Bay and motor up Concorde Road, heading back toward the terminals. During my time with Lance Broad and Beau Chenery, the pair told me that one of their favorite spotting locations is right beside the airport’s sewage treatment plant, which smells exactly as you’d imagine. If grown humans are willing to voluntarily subject themselves to those conditions purely in the hope of capturing unique, original photographs of airplanes, Brisbane Airport Corporation doesn’t really have to do anything at all to keep them happy.

On our winding route back to his office, Dunlop and I pass The Loop. It’s a stunningly clear Friday morning, and gathered on the concrete viewing platform on the other side of the fence are six young men with stepladders and camera lenses. Dunlop and I give them a wave as we drive past, and they wave back enthusiastically. By the time we round the corner and I look back over my shoulder, though, their eyes and lenses are already fixed on the next plane taxiing for takeoff.

Clock Man

$1000 LPs

HOW MUCH WOULD you pay for an original copy of The Beatles’ Abbey Road? If you shop at Better Records, the answer is plenty: $650. Other staples from the heyday of vinyl command equally astronomical prices. Fleetwood Mac’s eponymous LP: $500. The Police’s Synchronicity: $350. Even kitsch like The B-52s is a sticker shocker at $220.

And that’s the cheap stuff. Prices for wish list titles like The Who’s Tommy, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and The Beatles’ White Album would make a military contractor blush: $1,000.

Price gouging? Not according to Better Records owner Tom Port. He thinks a thousand bucks is a bargain to hear a classic rock opus sound better than you’ve ever heard it sound before—stoned or sober.

“I’d like to charge $1,500, because that’s what I think these records are worth,” he says. “But I don’t, because the customers balk.”

This is what passes for fiscal restraint in the world of high-end audio: drawing the line at three figures for mass-produced records that sold in the millions, the same dorm room relics found in milk crates at tag sales. But Port insists that his meticulously curated discs are special. Unlike many record dealers, he doesn’t peddle the usual dreck pocked with scratches and pot resin. He traffics strictly in “hot stampers,” the very best of the best.

Hundreds of factors determine what a vintage record will sound like, from the chain of ownership and whether it’s been properly stored to the purity of the vinyl stock and the quality of the equipment that produced it. One factor many serious record collectors fixate on is the quality of the stampers, the grooved metal plates used to press a lump of hot vinyl into a record album. Like any metal die, these molds have a finite lifespan. The accumulation of scratches, flaws, and other damage resulting from the tremendous mechanical stress a stamper is subjected to—100 tons of pressure during a production run—leads to a gradual loss of audio fidelity in the finished records. To ensure the best sound quality, some boutique companies that press heavy vinyl today limit their stampers to 1,000 pressings. In contrast, during the peak of the vinyl boom, major labels churned out as many as 10,000 copies on a single stamper. It’s preferable to have a record pressed early in a production run, before the metal exhibits signs of wear, rather than toward the end, right before a fresh stamper is slapped on.

Nab an early pressing of an iconic title produced under ideal conditions, take really (really) good care of it for 40 years, and maybe it’ll be judged a hot stamper worth four figures.

Scott Hull, a recording engineer who owns Masterdisk, one of the world’s premier mastering facilities, compares producing a vinyl record to making wine. “Each pressing of the grape, and each pressing of the disc, is unique,” Hull says. “Hundreds of subtle things contribute to each pressing being different. Everything matters, from plating the lacquers to various molding issues to the quality of the vinyl pellets.”

Selling these artifacts at these prices requires more than a list of customers with too much disposable income. It takes hard work, chutzpa and catalog copy that ignites neural brush fires in the amygdala.

Consider these tasting notes for the Rolling Stones’ Emotional Rescue ($230): “A killer pressing … serious punch down low, superb clarity, all the extension up top and a HUGE open sound field … you’ll have a hard time finding any Stones record that sounds this good period!” Confirmation bias? Probably. Port had me at “killer pressing.”

Although Better Records offers jazz, blues, classical, and the occasional genre novelty (faux-Polynesian exotica is a recurring guilty pleasure), invariably it’s nostalgic classic rock albums like that Stones semi-classic from 1980 that become hot stampers.

But finding such pristine and aurally transcendent records isn’t easy.

Hot or Not?

The painstaking process begins by scouring the used market—from Salvation Army bins to eBay—for a dozen or more clean copies of an album. Next comes the obligatory spa regimen: a three-step enzyme wash followed by a deep groove vacuuming with two record cleaning machines, one of them an $8,000 Odyssey RCM MKV, an instrument the size of an airline beverage cart handcrafted by persnickety Germans.

Grunt work completed, the hot stamper king and his minions meet in the Better Records listening room for a round of tests dubbed a “Shootout.”

By the standards of your stereotypical tube-loving, power-junkie audiophile, the amp Port uses as the hub of his Shootout machine is shockingly ordinary: a 1970s Japanese integrated transistor amp rated at a feeble 30 watts per channel, a typical thrift-store find. “I use a low-power, solid state amp because it doesn’t color the music,” he explains. “Tubes make everything sound warm and add distortion. That can sound nice, but I need accuracy.”

The other components are much more upscale. The Legacy Focus speakers have been modded with Townshend Super Tweeters, for example, and the turntable sports a Tri-Planar Precision Tonearm and a Dynavector 17D3 cartridge. Everything has been carefully selected for sonic neutrality. This isn’t about conjuring mega-bass or shimmering highs. The goal is flat frequency response, getting as close as possible to the sound on the original master tape. Nothing added or subtracted. The total price for Port’s shootout rig comes to $35,000.

When the shootout finally gets underway, lights are dimmed, eyelids fall and ears peak. With each cut sampled, the usual things are carefully pondered: presence, frequency extension, transparency, soundstage, texture, tonal correctness, and an elusive quirk called “tubey magic” (seriously). Every element is scrutinized in granular detail. If opinions diverge or memories fail, reference copies are pulled from the archive to check benchmarks. It’s tedious work. Deciding whether Side B of Emotional Rescue is a “Mint Minus Minus” (7 on a scale of 1-10), or a “Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus” (8-9), requires dedication, stamina and intense focus. When the grades are tabulated, a sonic pecking order emerges:

It’s tempting to dismiss hot stampers as pseudoscience, like cryogenically treated speaker cables, power amp fuses zapped with Tesla coils, and every other confidence scheme devised to separate affluent middle-aged audiophiles from the contents of their wallets. Talk to enough studio engineers and record plant technicians, though, and it becomes apparent that the aural disparity between records that Tom Port prattles on about really does exist.

Industry experts agree that copies of the same album can, and often do, sound different; sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Not just from copy to copy, and from side A to side B, but from track to track, and, yes, even within the same track. In fact, vinyl records made on the same stamper, during the same production run also can vary in sound quality. Other copies, bearing different record labels, pressed in different countries, using different equipment and personnel, will impart their own sonic flavor, which only muddles the issue further.

“There’s actually little reason why any two discs should sound the same,” says Masterdisk’s Scott Hull. “A grading system based on the different significant factors makes sense: surface noise, relative distortion during playback, and things like skips and major pops.” Before this becomes a hot stamper endorsement, Hull lowers the boom: “Saying one disc is wrong and another is right is very controversial. Only the producer, the mastering, and cutting engineers really know what that record was supposed to sound like.”

Most members of hobbyist web forums who discuss vinyl records are vehemently anti-hot stamper. It's the exorbitant markup, of course, that provokes all the outrage.

The textbook example of good mastering gone bad is the 1969 Atlantic Records release of Led Zeppelin II. The first pressing, mastered by a young Bob Ludwig, beats every other pressing and reissue by a wide margin. This record is easily identified by scanning the matrix, a product code located in the run-out area next to the label. There, etched in the dead wax are the letters “RL/SS,” shorthand for Robert Ludwig/Sterling Sound. Known among dealers as the “hot mix,” it has such energy and dynamic range that when it was released it caused the needles on cheap record players to literally jump out of the grooves. This happened when Ahmet Ertegun, the president of Atlantic Records, brought a copy home to his daughter. Judging the record defective, he immediately ordered a new pressing with the signal dialed down and compressed. Ludwig would later lament that this version “sounded puny and aghh!”

Still, like everything else having to do with manufacturing vinyl records, there are no rules or absolutes. A desirable matrix isn’t foolproof. It’s only a good omen. A random hot mix of Led Zeppelin II may sound fantastic, but some of the 200,000 “RL/SS” copies that were pressed sound better than others. This is what keeps Better Records in business and earns Tom Port a comfortable six-figure income. A Led Zeppelin II white hot stamper is $1,000.

If there is one question that needs to be asked at this point, it is this: Who actually buys these things?

The Collectors

Although there are currently 117 testimonials posted on the Better Records website, the success of this bold enterprise hinges on 20 to 30 “preferred customers” who spend as much as $100,000 a year on hot stampers. These clients are wealthy audiophiles with a penchant for classic rock who like nothing better than to sit in an overstuffed wing chair sipping Pétrus and reading Tom Port’s vivid descriptions of the latest shootout winners.

Bill Pascoe, a full-time political consultant and part-time audiophile, is one such customer. Like all hot stamper addicts, he was initially skeptical. The gateway LP for him was Steely Dan’s Aja. Port’s notes boasted that it crushed the lavishly praised Cisco 180-gram Aja reissue. Pascoe was dubious. But as a Washington power broker, he could certainly afford $130 to find out.

“After the first track, I said, ‘My God, there’s something to this!'” That was eight years ago. Today, Pascoe owns more than 100 hot stampers. “I’m not a recording engineer,” he says. “All I know is that Tom’s records sound better.”

Roger Lawry, a biomedical engineer in California, was hooked by a hot stamper of Blood Sweat & Tears‘ self-titled LP, the title Port deems “the best sounding pop or rock album ever recorded.” Lawry has accumulated about 150 hot stampers since then. Adjusted for inflation, that’s the equivalent of buying a new Mercedes E-Class. The only difference is that one has an excellent resale value.

Lawry admits this pricy vinyl won’t pad his investment portfolio, but he has no regrets. “If you’re going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on hardware, why wouldn’t you pay a few hundred for the software?” he asks. A recent salary cut, however, has forced Lawry to curb his vinyl excess. Still, if the right hot stamper came along, he says he wouldn’t hesitate pulling the trigger: “I’d be willing to pay $500 for the best copy of Aja.”

The Chorus

Not only are these original vinyl copies shiny and minty fresh, Port will tell you they also sound better than any of those $30 reissues “sourced from the original master tapes” currently in fashion. Port has particular disdain for these premium, heavy vinyl records, with their bonus tracks and glossy liner notes.

“Those records sound horrible,” he growls. “A flea market copy of Sweet Baby James will sound better than any new 180-gram version.” Surely, there must be some notable reissues of other pop albums? The 60-year-old California native pauses. “If there are, I haven’t heard them.”

This outright dismissal of an entire industry has made Port a pariah in most audiophile circles. It’s an emotional subject. Jonathan Weiss, the owner of Oswalds Mill Audio, a hi-fi sanctuary in Brooklyn known for its outstanding horn speakers, barely contains his contempt. “This guy is the poster child for everything that’s wrong with the business,” he says. “He caters to the worst fears and anxieties of audiophile victims. It’s really absurd.” Weiss finishes by calling Port a couple of names we can’t print.

To truly understand the fears and anxieties of vinyl aficionados, follow the impassioned threads that unravel on the hobbyist web forums. Although Port has supporters, they’re a minority. Most members of sites like audiokarma and audioasylum who discuss vinyl records are vehemently anti-hot stamper. It’s the exorbitant markup, of course, that provokes the outrage.

Port finds the criticism amusing. On his website, he mocks these people where it hurts: By criticizing their obsessive-compulsive love for bachelor pad hi-fi gear from the Boogie Nights era. “Pioneer turntables? In this day and age? What time warp did these guys fall through anyway? It’s as if the last thirty years of audio never happened.” (Never mind the apparent hypocrisy of his using a 40-year-old amp to rate his records.)

He also relishes ripping their precious 180-gram LPs to shreds and stomping on them. “Heavy vinyl is just a gimmick, like gold plated CDs,” he says.

To Port’s dismay, record labels have doubled down on the surging vinyl market, promising even higher fidelity by pushing a new format: the 45-RPM, double LP. Remastered at half-speed, these limited edition records, if properly produced and manufactured, have the capability to outperform single 33-RPM discs because the stylus spends more time in the grooves retrieving data. Critics gush about greater dynamic range and improved transient response.

Predictably, Tom Port isn’t a fan. Here’s his review of Metallica’s Ride The Lightning, a Warner Brothers 45-RPM album remastered at MoFi from the original analog tape: “Compressed, sucked-out mids, no deep bass and muddy mid-bass, the mastering of this album is an absolute disaster on every level.” He chuckles when asked how many business relationships have soured over the years due to unpopular opinions like this. “I burn all my bridges,” he says. “I want nothing to do with any of these people.”

The Duel

Stereophile columnist Michael Fremer falls into this category. In October, the audio critic conducted a poll on his blog, Analog Planet, to address the hot stamper vs. heavy vinyl debate. The material chosen for this audio contest was RCA’s 1960 “Living Stereo” recording of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a symphonic poem considered by audiophiles to be one of the greatest performances ever captured on vinyl.

In one corner was the prohibitive favorite: Analogue Productions’ 200-gram, 33-RPM reissue, a record that prominent critics, including Fremer (he called it “transformative”), argued was better than the original. The challenger was a vintage RCA pressing of Scheherazade that Port had personally selected from his hot stamper stash. The records were transferred to hi-res 24bit/96KHz files—well above standard CD quality—and posted on Fremer’s blog for readers to sample. When the votes were tallied, the new Analogue Productions version was declared the winner by a 6 percent margin.

Port dismisses the results as meaningless, blaming his hot stamper’s poor showing on flawed methodology. “Fremer labeled one of the files ‘AP,'” he says incredulously. “Voters knew that was Analogue Productions. So, the experiment was biased from the start! When it was corrected, we caught up fast.”

He could have left it at that, but the thought of smoldering bridges excites Port too much. Convinced that the industry high priests are aligned against him, he lashes out: “Michael Fremer once said he had six copies of Aja, and they all sounded the same. That’s impossible on a good system! Is he deaf?”

Fremer has since conducted several live listening sessions using the same two Scheherazade pressings. In each case, the results were, in Fremer’s words, “pretty much 50-50.” Which would seem to indicate, at least in this instance, that heavy vinyl and hot stampers are more about personal preference than one record actually sounding better than the other.

“If you can afford it, I think Tom provides a good product,” Fremer says diplomatically. “Although, I don’t always agree with him on everything.”

X-rated Model Railways

THINGS are getting a bit HORNBY in the world of miniature railways.

Enthusiasts are spicing up their displays with steamy sets of miniature doggers, prostitutes, Peeping Toms and nudists.

The set of x-rated collectibles sold by Buffers Model Railways also includes a variety of naked couples caught in compromising positions in miniature houses.

Maria Husson, 50, owner of the store based in Axminster, Devon, said: "All sorts of people buy them, for private collections or demonstration tracks.

"Normally they'd hide the rude figures in a house with a red light in the window, but if it is just an adult audience they'd put them in view."

She added: "People make out model railways are boring but they're really not."

Buffers Model Railways has even won endorsement from Top Gear's James May, who described it as "my kind of model shop" in an online review.

The collection is made by German firm Noch, and are figures are priced at £3 for one to £16 for a set of six.

All the Top 40 Records

A stunning record collection containing every chart single made has been discovered crammed into the terraced house of its late owner. Single-minded Keith Sivyer bought every new release that entered the UK single charts since their inception in 1952 until his death in February aged 75.

Every week, without fail, Keith visited his local record shop with a copy of Music Week and bought the latest songs that had entered the top 40 before going home and adding them to his archive.

After his death his younger brother, Gerald, was left with the daunting task of finding a new home for the collection. He found approximately 27,000 7ins vinyl singles and 8,000 12ins singles neatly filed in alphabetical order on purpose built floor-to-ceiling shelves that covered the four walls of Keith's lounge.

More than 10,000 CD singles from the 1980s to present day also filled up a spare bedroom of his modest home in Twickenham, south west London.

There were dozens if not hundreds of CDs still in their cellophane wrappers from where he hadn't had the time to open and listen to them.

Keith had safely stored the covers for most of the singles and replaced them with white sleeves on which he wrote the date the song was released and the chart position it achieved.

Auctioneers now selling the collection don't believe there is a single single missing, although it would take weeks to trawl through it all to make absolutely sure.

The archive contains the good, the bad and the downright ugly that graced the shelves of record shops across Britain for over six decades.

There is everything from Abba to ZZ Top, including all 39 Beatles singles and re-released singles, the 52 Rolling Stones' chart hits and the 72 songs released in the UK by Elvis.

Iconic number ones include Abba's Waterloo, Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Bony M's Rivers of Babylon and Michael Jackson's Thriller.

There are also the record-breaking singles that remained at number one the longest; I Believe by Frankie Lane in 1953, Bryan Adams' I Do It For You in 1991 and Love Is All Around by Wet, Wet, Wet in 1994.

And there are also more dubious tracks of our time such as the Wurzels' Combine Harvester, the Birdie Song, Agadoo, Bombalurina, Clive Dunn and a Tribe of Toff's John Ketley is a Weatherman.

Keith Sivyer's collection eventually graduated from the lounge and took over the second floor of his house. "It was a passion and an obsession for him. "We believe the collection to be one of the most complete and possibly unique in private hands in the country. We can't guarantee for sure it is absolutely complete because it would take months to go through every one but we think it is."

Keith started his collection in 1954 and retrospectively bought all the singles that had entered the charts for the previous two years. He used to walk into Earfriend record shop in Twickenham every Thursday with the latest copy of Music Week and buy all the new release singles in the charts for that week. Record shop owner John Carroll got so used to Keith's custom he put the records aside for when he came in.

As his collection grew Keith naturally became a mobile DJ although he worked for 37 years as an airside worker for British Airways at Heathrow.

When he divorced from his wife in the mid 1970s he moved back in with his mother Louise along with his collection. Keith naturally became a mobile DJ although he worked as an airside worker for British Airways at Heathrow

His brother Gerald, a 68-year-old retired builder, said: "It became an obsession with him. He must have spent an absolute fortune by the end. "Most of the singles were bought in the week they were released from a record shop called Earfriend. "When the shop closed, he started buying them from Woolworths and then off the internet in recent years.

"I had to reinforce the floor of the house at one point because of the weight of the boxes he kept some of the the records in. "He then took over the whole front room and started putting up these shelves. "He used to drive my mother mad. When I went to visit I would notice the collection was just growing and growing. It was crammed in like sardines. "He did tell me before he died that one day it would all be mine and I asked him what on earth I would do with it. "I would have loved to have kept them and if I had a big house I would have but I live in the first floor flat and it is just not practical."

The collection has been divided into three lots for the auction, with the 27,000 seven inch singles conservatively estimated at £6,000, the 8,000 12 inch records at £1,500 and 10,000 CDs and cassettes at £600.

Crowd Sourcing Old Airfix Models

Crowdfunding platforms are often used to finance outlandish products, say an underwater jet pack or a toy gun that kills insects using salt, but the owner of Airfix believes they can be adapted for the more traditional hobby of building model aircraft.

Hornby, the modelmaker that owns Airfix, has launched KitStarter, a crowdfunding platform that will allow enthusiasts to commit to buy models from its archive, some of which have not been available for 50 years.

Airfix, which traces its roots to the late 1930s, has an extensive back catalogue and archive of models that are out of production but remain in demand by collectors. The company regularly gets requests to reintroduce older models and it believes that KitStarter will make their production viable.

Although wartime aircraft make up the bulk of requests, Hornby said that kits featuring garden birds and historical figures such as Oliver Cromwell would be reintroduced if enough people committed to buy them.

Thomas Budden, an avid aircraft modeller from Cornwall, said: “There is a desire that Airfix should go back to the early, rare kits and re-release them. As long as they keep a close eye on the quality of the mouldings and don’t just re-release the old kits without any tweaks to bring them up to a decent contemporary standard, then they will do really well.”

Richard Ames, chief executive of Hornby, said that KitStarter could open the market to new fans. “This initiative is one of a number where we are working hard to build closer links with our consumers,” he said. “Many of these people are loyal enthusiasts who have been fans of Airfix for a long time.

“We are also confident that KitStarter will help us to reach a new generation of model enthusiasts that we can attract into the hobby.”

Rod Stewart Model Railways

You may not think it’s sexy, but Rod Stewart has revealed that he has been sneaking models into his hotel room — only they are trains, not blondes.

Rod Stewart has been a fan of model railways since he was a boy. The singer, left, with his wife, Penny Lancaster, has a huge set in his LA home. The veteran rock star is so attached to his boyhood hobby that he books a separate room when he goes on tour so that he can set up his workshop and tinker with his miniature locomotives. Stewart admits that people laugh when they hear about his passion for playing with trains, but he made clear in a recent interview that he definitely does want to talk about it.

He told BBC Radio London that he takes cases full of model kit on tour with him to build railways, instead of the more conventional pastimes of throwing televisions out of the window or snorting drugs with groupies. “When I am on the road in hotel rooms, like the Ritz-Carlton in New York, they clear out a room for me,” he said. “All my cases come in and they set up tables and lamps and fans to get rid of the fumes and it becomes my workshop.” Giving away a hint of his hedonistic days before he brought his model railways on tour, he added: “For many bands on the road there are only so many times you can go to a museum, but me, I have got my hobby, and it’s fantastic. We ship all the cases and they go on the jet and away we go.”

The 70-year-old singer has a model railway in his Beverly Hills home that is bigger than a tennis court — measuring 30ft by 110ft — with 13 trains running through a model city that he built from scratch. He is held in high esteem among model railway enthusiasts for his perfect 1:87 scale model of New York’s Grand Central Station, circa 1940. Stewart constructed the 1,500 sq ft diorama while on the road. When it was finished he wrote to Model Railroader magazine, asking “as an avid reader of yours”, if they would publish photos of his handiwork. Stewart has said that being on the cover of Model Railroader was better than being on the cover of Rolling Stone.

His hobby began when he was a boy, growing up in a flat above his parents’ newsagent’s shop on Archway Road in Highgate, north London, and watching the trains from his window. “It used to overlook the marshalling yards and the Tube lines so every time I would get up in the morning I would see the trains. My dad bought me a train set, as dads do, and it has stayed with me for ever and ever,” he said. “It’s a wonderful hobby and I know people laugh at it but I don’t care.”

The singer said that the pleasure was in the building of the scale models and less about controlling the locomotives. But woe betide you if you call it a train set, because you will get the withering reply: “It’s not a train set, it is a scale model railroad.” With a fortune estimated at £115 million, Stewart, who releases his 30th solo album Another Country next month, has set his sights on scaling up and owning his own working steam locomotive.

“Trains are my life — not just model trains but real steam trains as well. I’ve looked into buying a real one and it’s closer than you think. I’d love to own a steam engine and just sit on one.”

Conservation of Relics

Other Resources

• Books About Collecting
• Anecdotes About Collecting
• Quotations About Collecting