One man’s old gas pump can be another man’s treasure—if he’s a collector of automobilia, a term referring to collectible items related to automobiles. These items can range from racing event posters to racing trophies to racing suits and helmets, from car parts to sales brochures to maintenance manuals.

“Automobilia is a very broad term,” says Mike Fairbairn, the executive vice president and cofounder of RM Auctions in Blenheim, Ontario, Canada, which specializes in the sale of collector cars and also conducts automobilia sales. At RM’s Sporting Classics of Monaco event in May, a 1,000-piece lot of Shell Oil memorabilia sold for the equivalent of $166,000. (The lot’s contents actually fall into an automobilia subcategory, petroliana.)

Whoever made the high bid on that lot did so because he or she has a fondness for the Shell logo and for enameled signs, glass pump globes, and oilcans. Or at least that should have been the motivation behind the acquisition. When purchasing automobilia, you should apply the same essential principle you would when acquiring any collectible items, whether those are works of art, classic cars, or baseball cards: Buy what you like. So say the experts.

FOR LOVE, NOT MONEY
“Refrain from buying for investment purposes, and buy for pleasure,” says Morry Barmak,  the owner of Collector Studio Motorsport Gallery, which he founded in 1991, in Toronto. “The same thing that holds true for any type collecting holds true for automobilia: Don’t buy for investments; buy what you like. Though, most items do hold their value, and some go up over time. Ferrari items typically are blue-chip.”

The Ferrari items in Barmak’s $3.5 million inventory include the 1948 Targa Florio trophy, the first major international award won by Ferrari. It is priced at about $50,000. He also has an Enzo Ferrari package that includes a wool suit, shirt, shoes, and tie from the 1970s that belonged to the marque’s founder. The entire package costs about $100,000. (Barmak notes that of the 400 owners of Ferrari Enzo supercars, 150 are on his mailing list.)

In the 1980s, Everett Anton “Tony” Singer, owner of Vintage Auto Posters in Carmel Valley, Calif., used to collect Ferraris and the corresponding promotional posters that the carmaker produced. He’d sell the cars but keep the posters. After a while, the Ferrari posters plus the Porsche posters he had obtained for free from dealerships in the 1970s numbered close to 100. (“It was brilliant marketing by Porsche,” says Singer. “They knew an 18-, 19-, or 20-year-old kid wasn’t going to be able to write a check for a new car. But they could give that kid a poster and plant the seed.”) He started selling the posters, and eventually this enterprise evolved into his business. He now belongs to the International Vintage Poster Dealers Association, which has only about 80 members worldwide.

To would-be collectors of automobilia, Singer offers advice similar to Barmak’s. “It shouldn’t be a function of an investment. That should have nothing to do with it,” says Singer, who also runs the annual Automobilia Monterey event, which this year takes place August 10 and 11, during Concours Week, at the Embassy Suites hotel ballroom. “If we’re talking about a poster that you’re hanging on a wall in a den or an office, you’re going to be seeing it all the time. You don’t want buyer’s remorse. You don’t want to say, ‘I loved that other piece, but I was told this was a great investment.’ An item has to resonate with you for you to buy it.”
 
Speaking specifically of posters, Singer adds, “For whatever reason, this piece has to do something for you. Maybe it’s a poster of some event your father took you to when you were a boy, or it’s from a place you were stationed in the military. I’ve had people buy posters for events that took place on their birthday.”

GUSSY UP TO THE GARAGE
Items from an early-20th-century Ford dealership resonate with RM Auctions’ Fairbairn. He has a collection of more than a dozen cars—ranging from Brass Era vehicles to muscle cars­—and houses them in a barn that he had built. Along the building’s interior walls are life-size reproductions of a half-dozen storefronts, each representing a business that a member of his or his wife’s family once ran. His father’s uncle operated a Ford dealership in the 1910s, and so Fairbairn is currently constructing a portion of a showroom in his car barn. “I’ll decorate it with items from a Ford dealership of that era,” says Fairbairn.

His car barn also includes a mock-up of a 1922 White Rose service station. (White Rose was one of the largest gasoline brands in Canada at the time.) The gas station is stocked with road maps, and an auto parts supply company calendar from 1922 hangs on the wall. In front of the station is a White Rose gas pump that Fairbairn had restored.
 
While Fairbairn’s car barn might be elaborate, it does demonstrate a practical use for automobilia. “It goes so well with cars,” says Fairbairn. “I can’t tell you the last time I walked into a garage where a car collection was housed and didn’t see an automobilia collection—even if it’s just posters and signs on the walls. If you just have the cars by themselves, the space can look like a parking garage. The automobilia makes it more of a viewing room.”

BUY THE BEST
Fairbairn and Singer both note that original pieces will always be more valuable then reproductions. “In 30 years I’ve never seen the value of an original poster go down, because there’s always fewer of them in the market,” says Singer.
 
“Every day a few more originals deteriorate,” adds Fairbairn, noting that when making a purchase you also should consider an item’s condition, because the more it has to be restored, the more its value decreases. RM employs a scale of 1 through 10 in assessing conditions. Pristine items receive a 1, and anything rated 4 or higher will require restoration. “A desirable enameled gas station sign could range in price from $150 for a 4 or 5 to $2,500 for a 1,” says Fairbairn.

If you had to choose between those two signs, Barmak would recommend that you buy the one for $2,500, provided it’s in your price range. “Buy the best piece you can afford,” says Barmak. “You think of the guy who buys four or five Rolexes and then a couple of Breguets and before he knows it, he owns 15 good watches when he could own one really valuable watch.”
 
Barmak says he has customers who own five or six replica helmets when, for the same price, they could own one or two originals. “This happens because people start buying without thinking that they’re going to become collectors. But you need only one car to be a car collector; that gets the ball rolling.
 
FIND A FOCUS
Because of the volume of automobilia that’s available, narrowing your choices can prove beneficial, says Barmak. “When you’re collecting, it helps to have a focus,” he says. If you like scale-model cars, for instance, you might consider collecting only racecars from a certain era.
 
It’s not unusual for automobilia collectors to become narrowly focused on certain items, Fairbairn says. “I know a guy who has about 250 trophies from pre-1930 driving events. He has cartons of them. He owns cars and he has some signs for the walls of his garage, but mostly he collects these trophies.”

Barmak says that most of his customers’ purchases—paintings, maintenance manuals, event posters—are related to the cars in their collections. In fact, his customers who own Ferraris can search his inventory for chassis-specific items. “You can punch in your chassis number and get a readout of all the automobilia we have that’s related to that particular car.”

THE ART OF ADVERTISING
Such specific connections are common, but an automobilia collection doesn’t have to have any ties to a car collection. “A person could have a collection of Mercedes-Benzes, and on the walls of his garage have signs for Michelin tires and Shell gasoline,” says Fairbairn. “You buy the signs because you like them and because the artwork is good. The artwork for advertising tended to follow what was contemporary at the time. It reflected what was considered the best art of that era, regardless if it was advertising motor oil or gasoline.”

Singer, an artist himself, who used to run his family’s high-end printing business in New York, has a few favorite posters that he values more for the images they display than for their rarity or historical significance. These include a black-and-white 1972 Porsche Carrera RS poster (priced as high as $8,000), the first Le Mans poster (from 1923), and the 1929 Grand Prix du Cap d’Antibes poster, an Art Deco image from which Ralph Lauren created a tie pattern.

“Whether I’m buying for myself or for resale, it needs to be a visually compelling piece,” says Singer. “There are lots of valuable pieces that I’ve stayed away from because they don’t do it for me graphically.”