Camp, but still worth £79,000

This is the sort of fantasy tale to turn the passionate, penurious pottery collector green with envy as he dodges the puddles and counts out his pennies on a cold, wet morning in Portobello.

While they might agonise for a week over justifying even the smallest purchase, the late Allen Harriman and Edward Judd, who had made a mint by publishing a newsletter for coin collectors and dealers, would fly into town from sunny California and indulge in exuberant frenzies of extravagant buying.

Their penchant was British Art Pottery, initially the salt-glazed stoneware introduced in the late 19th century by several Lambeth potteries in a bid to promote their far more profitable core businesses of utilitarian wares such as sewage piping.

Anyone who bought up these rather dark and almost crudely earthy ceramics and transported them to a dazzlingly bright, 1920s Spanish-style mansion in the Hollywood Hills had to be a collector with vision or chutzpah, and probably both. The duo began to buy in the late Sixties, a time when all things Victorian were beginning to elicit interest again after a half century of neglect.

While they soon established themselves as obsessive, almost indiscriminate accumulators - at one time Judd's method was to buy anything important enough to find its way on to a catalogue cover - they ended up as astute and highly knowledgeable connoisseurs. Their vast collection was probably the finest and most comprehensive of its kind in the world. It could document entire factory histories - the Doulton Lambeth Art Pottery Studio,the wacky productions of the Martin Brothers - and embraced Minton majolica, Pilkington's lustre wares, rainbow-hued Moorcroft, modern studio pottery ...

It is a testament to its quality that when 500 pieces were offered by Sotheby's in New York, only 24 of them failed to find buyers. The star lot, the 4ft-tall History of England vase, was one of the casualties. The top price of £79,000 - four times the estimate - was paid for a rather camp lifesize Minton Blackamoor, right. Most lots soared way over estimate to total £2.2 million; a further 300 lots are offered on sothebys.com, until 7 February.