Private collector seeks like-minded people: John Windsor on an investigative work that uncovers some of Britain's most secret societies

LES HOOLE collects collecting clubs. He has 110 and has just published the first guide to them. They can be an elusive quarry - secretive, circumspect, shielding their collectables from prying eyes. Mr Hoole has had to be extremely persistent.

The silhouette club was pleased to be invited to come out and blink in the light of publicity. So were collectors of jigsaw puzzles, beer labels and teddy bears. But golfing-memorabilia and walking-stick collectors wanted nothing to do with his guide. Two of the most secretive clubs - whichever they are - returned Mr Hoole's postal questionnaire still blank. The most unapproachable must be the cigar-band collectors, who appear to have emigrated to Australia.

They were not the only nomads: other clubs frequently change addresses and officers, needing three or four letters to track them down. Mr Hoole said: 'I couldn't understand why so many people were so reticent. It isn't as if I was charging them for publication.'

Mr Hoole, a Bradford transport company administrator, thinks it strange that no guide to collecting clubs has hitherto been published, and feared thoughout his two years of research that somebody else would beat him to it. Perhaps would-be rivals encountered the same difficulties. Collectables, however ephemeral, can turn the mildest hobbyist into a snarling acquisitor tormented by fears of burglary. Up to 250,000 apparently normal citizens - the total membership of the clubs in the guide - may exhibit such behaviour when cornered by a publisher or journalist.

In the case of golfing collectors, the fears about security are understandable: the top price for golfing items is pounds 627,000, paid for 23 clubs owned by past British Open champions at Sotheby's Chester in 1991.

The bright-yellow Hoole's Guide to British Collecting Clubs lists addresses (or PO boxes) but not telephone numbers and the names of the officers - which makes the clubs, however down-market their collectables, seem more exclusive than the Athenaeum. Here are forums for collectors of pens and postcards, buttons and beer mats. Their meetings (or 'meets'), in parlours and public library rooms, are hardly the sort of get-togethers where the Saatchi brothers might be found explaining why they dumped their minimalists. I could find no Old Masters Collectors Club.

The very names of some clubs sound designed to conceal their activities. For example, what cadaverous caperings might be spied through the lace curtains at meets of the Benevolent Confraternity of Dissectologists? And do they have anything to do with the Labologists Society? The answers are disappointing: dissectologists are collectors of jigsaw puzzles and labologists collect labels, especially those from beer bottles.

Some of the clubs do not even hold meets. The Mug Collectors Association, which has 100 members, has no annual fees and no newsletter either, but its address list enables members to correspond. The smallest club, the Great Britain Map Postcard Club, with seven members, a pounds 10 annual subscription and an AGM, publishes a newsletter called The Explorer, and requires members to compile lists of postcards with maps of their area. The biggest club, with 70,000 members, is the Stamp Bug Club, founded by the Post Office to encourage stamp collectors aged seven to 14.

Specialist stamp clubs are the most prolific. All the following are philatelic: Astro Space Stamp Society, Bicycle Stamps Club, Bird Stamp Society, Butterfly and Moth Stamp Society, Bypost Collectors Club (Post Office memorabilia), British Society of Football Philately, George VI Collectors Society, Guild of St Gabriel (stamps with a religious theme), Philatelic Music Circle, International Philatelic Golf Society, Hovermail Collectors Club, Polar System History Society of Great Britain, Raflet (aeroplanes on stamps), and the Ship Stamp Society.

Before Hoole's appeared, the best-known guides to include collecting clubs were the 600-page Directory of British Associations costing pounds 115 (listing every conceivable combination of like-minded beings - the Women's Cricket Association, the Steel Hinge Makers Association and so on) and the British Club Year Book, which ceased publication in 1990. Mr Hoole complained that library copies of the biennial directory were often out of date and of limited use in tracing collecting clubs, whose officers usually change annually. About 60 of his clubs, he says, are not in the directory.

He reckons that fine-quality newsletters alone make most annual subscriptions a bargain. He cited the impressive, full-colour cover of The Swallowtail, journal of the Butterfly and Moth Stamp Society. A mere pounds 6 annual sub buys three copies of it. The dissectologists offer, for a pounds 2 joining fee and pounds 1 annual sub, three newsletters and an annual magazine.

Mr Hoole said: 'I asked each club for a sample of its newsletter. They are collectables in themselves. It is a massive underground press which most people do not know about. These newsletters are written by the experts of the collecting world. They are cataloguing and making in-depth studies of things that most of us don't look at twice.'

For the market-maker, Mr Hoole's guide is a useful insight into trends. Did you know that the Sylvac Collectors Circle (dedicated to the ghastly matt- green ceramics by Shaw and Copestake, 1894-1982) has grown to 300 members since its foundation in 1988? It is one of those clubs that hold no meetings. Well, would you want to be seen with a piece of Sylvac?

Hoole's Guide to British Collecting Clubs, pounds 7.95 (plus 75p p & p): Adwalton Publishing (Les Hoole), 14 Penfield Road, Adwalton, Drighlington, Bradford, West Yorkshire.

Directory of British Associations, pounds 115 (inc p & p): CBD Research Publications, 15 Wickham Road, Beckenham, Kent.

(Photographs omitted)