Window shopping

photo by Emil Mayer

Over the last year on this blog I have posted three new additions to my collection of Celtic La Tène decoration. Since becoming so specialized in my collecting choices, finding three objects in a single year is unprecedented. I usually feel lucky if I find only one. It started with an unusually nice strap junction posted a year ago today. This was followed by an Iceni crescentic terret fragment in March, and a British Celtic horse-brooch fragment in April.

What with retiring this year and facing delays on some of my pensions/benefits, I had not been actively looking for new things to buy, but a few days ago I was curious about what I might have been missing and decided to risk any potential disappointment by doing a few web searches. I started with the 900+ listings for "Celtic" in the antiquities heading on Ebay (that's always the safest place to start if you are worried about being disappointed about not being able to afford to buy).

As I suspected, most things in the listing were not even Celtic. What few things that might have been used by Celts had very little, if any, La Tène decoration and what there was was later than my collecting interests. It seemed as if I was looking at a few things owned by people who were as poor as I was feeling at the time. Searching further afield, I found a few more examples of Celtic antiquities but nothing that interested me, and with very little decoration.

Sometimes, a good day's window shopping consists of not finding anything interesting. It's a glass half-full sort of thing.