![]() ![]() One of the most intriguing pieces in the room is a porcelain plate circa 1898 that reads "Broken Hill PV." It's from Tasmania, a small island off the southeastern coast of Australia. "It took me probably three or four years to get a plate from every state." "I always loved the challenge," says Andy Bernstein, 39, a wiry marketing consultant from Douglaston, N.Y., who's been collecting for 35 years. They all share a passion for plumbing the arcane. To the left, a bearded man prepares a makeshift stage for a plate auction whose proceeds will go to charity. To the right of the room's entrance, a group is ogling a display of 15 Philippines plates from the 1960s. The cafeteria-sized hall looks equally suited to host a middle school mixer and smells of musty plates and sweaty bodies, something between basement and locker room. The convention, one of many regional ALPCA meets, is packed with collectors their quarries are strewn across card tables or crammed into egg-crates. Reid and Stentiford were among the aficionados assembled at the Tice Senior Center in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., on a Saturday morning in early November. Though the most prized run upwards of five figures, the average plate goes for about $10 to $20. ![]() Many swap and buy at any of 50 regional ALPCA meetings a year. Others just apply a simple rule: "If it's pretty, and I can afford it," says Roger Reid, 53, a systems analyst from Yonkers, N.Y., who owns what he calls a "modest" collection of 200 plates.Ĭollections range in size from 200 to as much as 17,000. A handful hunt special designation plates like Livery, Truck, Wrecker, Dealer and the like. Most typical is the "birth year run," where a collector casts about for plates from all 50 states issued in his or her birth year. Some try to get a plate from every state, but with a unifying theme. Some countries allow individuals to trade street-legal plates these fetch obscene amounts of money in places like Abu Dhabi (Click here for the most expensive.)Īmerican hobbyists usually focus on collecting an entire "run" of plates. Smaller groups like the Netherlands' De Nummerplaat and France's Francoplat exist abroad. The world's largest is the U.S.-based Automobile License Plate Collectors Association (ALPCA) with 3,000 active members, established in 1954. Countless groups, formal and informal, have sprung up to link collectors. Like postage stamps or baseball cards, they've become a niche commodity. In the years since Paris issued the first license plate in 1893, tens of billions of tags have been produced and discarded. Only two are known to exist, making the 1913 plate more valuable than its 1912 predecessor. unearthed it after someone responded to a classified ad he'd placed in a Jackson newspaper looking for old Mississippi plates. Collectors didn't even know that the 1913 Mississippi plate existed until 1985, when Dr. Two others include the 19 Mississippi plates, worth an estimated $35,000 and $50,000, respectively. The 1921 Alaska isn't the only plate worth more than a new car. "They don't want the paparazzi and the other plate collectors beating down their doors." "These plates are so rare that people who own them like to keep it fairly low-profile," says Stentiford, who has over 17,000 plates of his own. In Pictures: America's Most Expensive License Plates Tim Stentiford, editor of PLATES magazine, estimates that the 1921 Alaska tag is worth $60,000 today. But the rarest ones are nearly priceless to thousands of license plate collectors around the country. These vintage plates aren't street-legal, though some states allow them to be used on classic cars of corresponding years. One of only four known to exist, it is the holy grail of a little-known hobby: license plate collecting. It wasn't just any piece of metal, but a 1921 Alaska plate. ![]()
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