Word: vres
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Collectionitis is as pervasive as inflation, as euphoric as a drug high. Its grip reaches far beyond the roseate world of Rembrandts, Sèvres porcelain and Georgian silver. A vast subculture of acquisition is feeding on scarce objects of every conceivable description. Britons are busily unearthing-and auctioneers as busily selling-such objects of dubious virtue as antique typewriters, gramophones and biscuit tins. Americans, with more catholic taste for trivia, have enshrined such unlovely objets trouvés as old flyswatters, orange reamers, apple parers, Kraft cheese jars (a.k.a. "swanky swigs"), Mickey Mousiana, player pianos, Coke bottle tops, beer...
...result, the antiques market is at present enjoying an unprecedented boom. The demand for a piece of the past was such that the auction houses hammered down one record after another in 1977: rare books ($360,000 for John James Audubon's Birds of America), Sèvres porcelain ($102,600 for Marie Antoinette's delicately painted milk pail), American furniture ($135,000 for a Boston-made mahogany bombé chest, circa 1780), even tin toys ($3,105 for a Mickey Mouse organ grinder...
...vres, France...
Police promptly arrested Massol, who decided to share his secret with them after cooling his heels for a few hours at police headquarters on the Quai des Orfèvres. He led the cops to a garage in the working-class suburb of Saint-Ouen, where the casket was found in the back of a small truck. Police subsequently arrested three of Massol's alleged accomplices: they included François Boux de Casson, a former right-wing Deputy in the Assembly and once a propaganda officer in the Vichy government, and Michel Dumas, owner of a marble tomb...