Bull Market

With $100 to invest you shy away from a savings bank as too slow and from the stock market where 100 shares at a dollar each might be too speculative. If you read this book, there is no telling where you may end up. In 1967 a collector hooked on to a painting of some fish for $125 and sold it before the year was out for $2,400.

Rush concentrates not only on persons with a handful of one-dollar bills. He caters also to the near-rich and the very rich, but his emphasis on persons with modest means shows with figures and advice how to have fun collecting and to make money. His range is wide. If you have a bit of nervous cash eager to be out on the town and if you are interested in starting or completing a collection of any of the following, you had better begin with laying out $6.95: Chinese ceramics or Chippendale chairs, glassware or silverware, paintings or pottery, stamps or silk rugs, water colors or wood cuts. The index of 20 pages, double-column, gives a key to the vast number of possibilities.

With 128 illustrations, augmented by 19 tables and charts, most of them dealing with increases in prices, your money may become as itchy as your eye adventurous. Autographs are ideal for investment if you are a would-be collector with almost no purchasing budget. How about Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover each at $7.50, Albert Einstein for $25, Winston Churchill for $50, and John Kennedy for $150 (unless you prefer Jacqueline Kennedy for $20 or Richard Nixon for $7.50)?

Almost every area of collectibles, from 20th- century American paintings to antique English furniture to Oriental objects, is booming in sales volume and price. The frontispiece shows a Dutch silver-gilt nautilus cup, 11½ inches high, made by Jan Jacobsz van Royesteyn in 1596, purchased in 1938 for $800. In 1973 it sold for $55,000. How about antique cars? During the war years a Bugatti Royale was offered for $750. It is valued now at $150,000.

How about rare books? At least one collector of antique furniture, old-master paintings, Georgian silver, glassware and porcelains, who maintains an elaborate Queen Anne home and drives a Bentley and a Ferrari, insists that of all collectibles rare books are the best investment. If he needs money, he sells a book or two. Transactions are quick with no quibbling about price, and buyer and seller smile broadly.

If throughout the book, the dollar seems to be raising so crass a head as to seem gargoylish, let Rush right matters. He suggests that better than money is understanding past civilizations, the creation of the useful and the beautiful. With such practical and aesthetic appreciation one receives the most significant reward of all: "tremendous psychic income."

INVESTMENTS YOU CANLIVE WITH AND ENJOY. ByRichard H. Rush '37. U.S. Newsand World Report Books, 1974.Illustrated. 382 pp. $6.95.