Old curiosity stock

Prehistoric tooth anyone? Forget the festive tat – collectors are after antique oddities. John Vincent reports.

Christmas is long gone and all those unwanted presents – more than two billion pounds worth in Britain each year – have been consigned to the cellar, charity shop, wheelie bin or set aside to be recycled for someone else next year.

You know the sort of stuff: the boxed sets you’ll never watch, the hideous, illfitting pullover and gadgets you can’t work out how to use – or simply can’t be bothered. All discarded, along with those “amusing” inflatable Zimmer frames, chocolate sprouts, dogs’ ear defenders, wonky wine glasses and bacon jam.

Collectors of the truly arcane are not interested in tacky modern kitsch, of course, and antique curiosities which would have been dismissed as junk 40 years ago are now attracting big money. Such idiosyncratic yet discerning buyers were in their element at Christie’s in South Kensington for a sale which featured everything from 19th century Chinese jackets made of bamboo to sinister-looking 300 year old iron masks from Germany, erotic gambling die crafted from ivory to 16th century Ottoman armour for protecting a horse’s head.

How much am I bid for a dozen old door knockers and locks? A hundred pounds perhaps? No chance – the elaborate iron and bronze European assortment dating from the 17th-19th century made £4,750, while a 250-year-old bronze wine tap from Germany, modelled as a mythical dolphin, went for £2,250.

Smoking accoutrements are still popular and four 19th century bamboo pipes from South East Asia, the largest one carved in the form of a monkey’s head, realised £875 and three 18th century Chinese jade opium pipe mouth pieces fetched £813. Natural history exhibits with solid provenance are back in fashion, with the tooth of a megalodon, one of the largest and most powerful predators in vertebrate history, dating back 20m years, made £2,000, six Neolithic stone hammers £3,250 and four Neolithic axe heads £1,325.

Other lots to catch the eye included 18th century sailors’ fids (wooden

instruments for splicing rope), whalebone ivory-handled walking sticks, Crimean war quilt, copper crosses used as currency in Congo, a makeshift wooden ladder from Mali,

19th century workmen’s tools and artists’ easels, Mexican masks, Aboriginal spearthrowers and 17th apothecary’s mortar made of ivory.

But back to those bamboo jackets: they were originally intended, I learn, as life preservers for seamen and made £938, while that 400-year-old piece of Turkish gilt-copper armour to protect a horse’s head in battle, known as a chamfron (or chanfron), went for £42,500. Those two masks of blackened iron, pierced for the eyes, nose and mouth, realised £6,000 and reputedly came from the collection of torture and instruments of punishment at Nuremberg Castle, famed for its truly frightening “iron maiden” – a cabinet with hinged front and spike-covered interior, sufficiently tall to enclose a human being.

Now that is a curiosity…