Why the Bargain Often Isn't

Every Saturday morning, across church halls, market squares and car boot fields from Norfolk to Northumberland, the same quiet drama plays out. A stallholder props a "Georgian" oak chest against a trestle table, chalks £180 on a scrap of card, and within ten minutes two people are circling it like cats. One of them will buy it. Very often, it left a workshop in the last thirty years.

I am not sniffing at reproductions. Good ones have their place, and plenty of honest dealers sell them as such. The problem is when a copy is priced and sold as an original, and the buyer pays three or four times what the thing is worth. The good news is that fakers are usually lazy in the same predictable ways, and once you know where to look, most pretenders give themselves away in under a minute.

Wear Should Sit in the Right Places

Genuine age wears unevenly, and it wears where hands, feet and floors have touched it. Run your fingers along the parts of an object that get handled constantly and compare them with the parts that don't.

• Chair legs, table feet and chest corners should be bruised and lighter where centuries of floors have scuffed them.
• Drawer runners and the underside of drawer bottoms should be grooved and polished by friction, not freshly planed.
• Handles, catches, armrests and the leading edge of a lid should feel rounded and slightly hollowed.
• Wear should be smooth, gradual and inconsistent. A belt sander produces a uniform softness that looks like a bar of soap, with crisp edges still intact.

Look underneath. Genuine pieces are always grubbier, rougher and more patched below than above. A base that is cleaner than the top is a strong sign of a ring-in.

Screws, Nails and the Hardware Tell Tales

Hardware is the single most reliable dating tool you have, and it needs nothing more than a small torch and good eyesight. Take a jeweller's loupe to a market; nobody will think it odd.

• Phillips and Pozidriv screws are twentieth-century inventions. A crosshead screw in anything claiming to be Victorian furniture, or in the hinges of a "Georgian" box, settles it.
• Slotted screws are older, but look at the slot and shaft. Hand-made screws before the mid-nineteenth century have off-centre, ragged slots and tapered, slightly irregular shafts. Machine-cut screws with parallel sides and a neat, centred slot are later.
• Wire nails replaced cut and wrought nails in Britain in the late nineteenth century. A wire nail holding on a backboard is not necessarily fatal, but a whole carcass built with them is.
• Modern hinges, staples, screws and plywood are the classic signs of a piece cobbled together from old timber, which is very common with "reclaimed oak" dressers and blanket boxes.

Also check the screws for bright, sharp, unplated edges. Genuine old ironwork is oxidised, slightly pitted and often mismatched, because it has been replaced piecemeal over the years.

Patina, Polish and the Smell Test

Patina is not dirt; it is the accumulation of wax, sweat, smoke, sunlight and handling over decades. Fakers struggle with it because they are in a hurry.

• Grime should sit in the recesses, crevices and carved details, and be missing from the raised surfaces that get rubbed. Sprayed or brushed-on dirt sits on top of the surface instead.
• Look for dark, gritty sediment in the corners of joints and along the base of mouldings. If those corners are spotless while the flat panels are filthy, someone has been busy with a rag and a tin of wax.
• Smell the wood. Old oak, mahogany and pine smell of beeswax, dust and age. Freshly shellacked or stained pieces smell sharp, sweet or chemical.
• Beware of a glassy, uniform shine. French polishing is traditional, but original surfaces are usually worn back to a dull sheen in the areas people touch.

Tool Marks, Proportions and Marks

Hand tools leave signatures. Ripples and fine parallel ridges from a hand plane are good; wide, regular circular saw marks or the flat, faintly furry surface left by a thicknesser are signs of a modern workshop. Hand-cut dovetails are spaced irregularly with a slight taper, while machined ones are even and tight. On metalware, cast brass should show file marks, seams and a slightly uneven surface; a slick, seamless finish suggests casting from a modern mould.

Proportions matter too. Copies are frequently too chunky or too small, because they are scaled from photographs. Compare a suspect piece with a known one if you can. Finally, use the marks. On ceramics, a country name alone generally points to the late nineteenth century and later, and many potteries marked wares in ways that sit awkwardly with the age claimed. On furniture, an untouched maker's stamp should be faint, worn and irregularly impressed, not crisp and freshly inked.

A Quick Check Before You Pay

Take a deep breath and ask the stallholder a few easy questions: where did it come from, what is it made of, has anything been restored. Honest sellers will tell you about the replaced hinge. Vague ones will talk about "a house clearance" and change the subject. Then do a last sweep.

• Turn it upside down. Look for modern timber, fresh cuts and new fixings.
• Check wear, edges, screws and smells in that order.
• Compare the base with the top, and the back with the front.
• If more than one feature smells modern, walk away or pay reproduction money, not antique money.

Buy small, cheap and imperfect for your first few years. Handling genuine old things is the only real training, and a £12 battered box with honest wear will teach you more than any glossy dealer's cabinet. The pleasure of a flea market is the hunt, and half the fun is knowing exactly what you are looking at before you open your wallet.