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At Auctionata, we regularly provide valuations for items from all over the world. One day, a request arrived from a suburb of Vienna. The attached photos revealed a small collection of Old Vienna, Augarten and Meissen porcelain. It was an inheritance, now destined for auction. I was eager to see the porcelain with my own eyes – and it just so happened that I was in town. I called the seller and made an appointment.

A recently deceased professor’s estate was being put up for auction. There was an entire house full of heirlooms to be dealt with – and I decided the only way to get a proper overview was to visit in person.

We regularly receive large quantities of old silverware for auction. We divide the pieces into different categories, or bundles, according to their original purpose. As so often happens, I was given a bundle of silver boxes to sort.

We see it all the time: people start clearing out their attic or cellar and come across all sorts of weird and wonderful treasures. Most of the time, they don’t even suspect they could be sitting on a small fortune.

When selling second-hand watches there are a few items that come up frequently that are not what people think they are. The most commonly misidentified watch is the Omega Speedmaster, a watch worn into space by the Apollo astronauts during the late-1960s and early-1970s. Later the moon mission had a special factory engraving on the back stating that it was the "watch worn on the moon".

Some decades ago a New York auction house whose name begins with the letter "S" mailed out its latest catalogue of autographs and manuscripts. I took the catalogue home with me one evening, sat down in my easy chair and began to work my way through it without a great deal of interest, until I got to the letter "W." At that point I read a very unusual and intriguing entry.

As a veteran clothing & textile appraiser for the popular public television series “Antiques Roadshow” and owner of America’s top auction house for vintage fashion and textiles, I am requested by many institutions and private parties to appraise costume collections or to review items for inclusion in my specialty auctions. One such request came to me in June 2011 from a man living near Newark, New Jersey.

Some years ago I went on what was doubtless the most unusual client visit I have ever been on. The daughter of an elderly man contacted me to say she had moved her father into assisted living and before she put the house up for sale she would like someone to come and look through his collections to see if there was anything valuable that could be auctioned. So a colleague and I drove out to a small 1940s-era ranch house in a New Jersey suburb, where we were met by the daughter. At that point she informed us that seven years earlier, the pipes in the kitchen had rotted out, burst and flooded the place, and that her father had never replaced them or done much cleaning up after the water receded. (He had built a small latrine in the garden for certain needs, but that was the only water available.) Then she let us in.

Sometimes in art collecting the process of discovery seems to be almost fated. I remember one such incident over two decades ago which stands out in my mind above all others.

Two years ago I was at a very good friend’s parents’ house near Tegernsee in Bavaria. It was a family celebration at an old farmyard with a long history. It was a rural party with everything arranged in a very relaxed way with a buffet under an old oak.

I had been working in the world of Chinese art for many years, dividing my time between China and Paris. One day I received a call from an elderly lady near Montpellier. She told me she had a rare painting, passed down to her from her Chinese father, with letters to verify her story. She added that her father had told her the painter was a very important man and that should she need money in the future, she should remember she had it in her possession.

The story behind this Steiff “Peter Rabbit” sounds too good to be true, but I swear on a tall stack of Beatrix Potter books that it is!

The day began with a few scrolls that were acquired in Japan. Normally the routine would be opening the box, observing the box inscriptions and any attached documents, then hang the scroll to observe the painting and determine whether the work was done by the artist or not.

Flea market in Hamburg. Fish market 1969. My offer on the rickety trestle table was not exactly what you could have offered to an auctioneer without blushing. In the end, my old aunt whose home I wanted to flog off had not been one of the oldies whose address could be found on Elbchaussee with an odd number. Everything was a bit more humble.