Portfolio
Promising Perkins
Nephew Wilde's
A very relaxing pastime that I have recently discovered is attending. antique auctions. In a way prices are quite a good barometer to the general state of affluence and spending power. There is a direct relation also between the present high prices being realised for works of art and the international currency uncertainties.
Not that I myself would be inclined to buy a picture as an investment since this to me would detract from the more important aesthetic qualities. As it happened I was interested in two lots at an auction the other day. One was a small watercolour of HMS Dreadnought and the other a Samuel Beckett first edition. To my surprise both items came within my limits and I also discovered that I had bought sundry other articles. In the event these latter were the pearls in my assorted acquisitions as HMS Dreadnought on closer examination turned out to be HMS Cornwall and several pages were torn from the first edition.
One book in particular that struck me was on the subject of map collecting. The fascinating point about this work was that it revealed the degree of plagiarism among the early cartographers. For instance, Saxton the sixteenth century mapmaker marked a town on a map of Wiltshire but gave it no . name. Some years later another cartographer noted this and put ' Quare 'against the town, obviously intending to check later. This he forgot to do and the result was that the town's name was printed as Quare. Yet it was not for another 150 years, in which time several other cartographers repeated the error, that the mistake was discovered.
If there is a moral in this story it must be the importance of original research. Now I know that occasionally my broker, Wotherspool comes up with some bright idea, backed by careful research though at other times he is willing to plagiarise other people's work which might be rather flimsy. On this occasion, however, I believe he has done his homework thoroughly in recommending Baker Perkins. His appraisal of the group is, of course, tempered by the considerable upturn in the engineering
industry and from Baker Perkins itself there is the comfort that orders are now some 50 per cent up on a year ago. I am hoping that the next results from the group will pleasantly surprise after the latest 1972 figures showing pre-tax profits up from £1.79m to £2.48m.
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