The Atterbury guide to collecting

Collections like this enamelware give pleasure but investing in antiques can be risky. Picture / Carolyn Robertson

* Don't presume you'll make a quick buck out of antiques, just because you've seen Antiques Roadshow, where the old tat picked up for nothing at a church fair turns out to be an incredibly rare piece of china.

* Even calculated gambles can fail. "It's so unpredictable, all the people who have invested in antiques without actually thinking about whether they like the object or not always come unstuck. If you're worried about investing your money, put it in a bank."

* The unpredictability is dangerous, especially if you've got all your money tied up in pieces that are losing public favour. "At the moment late 18th century furniture in Britain is cheaper than it has been in 50 years - it's unsaleable. It comes down to pure fashion - if the next generation of collectors don't like the style they don't buy it."

* Atterbury believes we're driven by nostalgia and, as such, thinks modern collectables are becoming popular. "The new generation of collectors are collecting from the 1950s and 1960s, things that are within living memory and are undervalued because they bring back the past in an immediate way. Having said that, English 18th century pottery is still very cheap."

* Anyone starting out should consider collecting something different - with the possible exception of airline sick bags. "Why not go out on a limb because then you can have the fun of looking for it. For instance, photographs by famous, named photographers have always been expensive but nobody bothers to think about and buy unnamed amateur photographs, yet they're a fantastic social history. You can buy some family's photo album of the 1920s for a few pounds.

"Now a lot of the photographs will be dreadful but there will be some fantastic images among them."

* Fakes and how to spot them: "The problem with the business today is that more and more fakes are being made every year, and the skill of the faker, particularly in the Far East, gets better and better. Every year with Roadshow my lookout list for fakes gets longer and longer. If you see something at a car fair stall that you know is worth £500 ($1288) and it is £50 ($129), all your warning bells should ring. If the person selling it doesn't know what it is, they'd be charging £5 ($12.90). Therefore if it seems like a fantastic bargain but you're paying quite a bit for it, just be wary. The other thing is that fakes come in groups, therefore if you see one you're likely to see more of the same category. There's never one fake, there's a whole family of them."

* Learn to handle objects properly and don't cart them about in shoddy bags. "On Roadshow owners break their things all the time. They come to the show with quite a heavy object in a tatty old carrier bag, stand in line for three hours, pick it up and put it down and sooner or later the bag falls apart and the thing drops out at the bottom."