TRAVELING IN STYLE : EXCELLENT ADVENTURES : Pack Your Bags and Flea : The flea markets of Europe are jumping with bargains--but you’ve got to know the rules

I CAN’T IMAGINE TRAVELING TO A foreign city (and that means Minneapolis as well as Madrid) without immediately finding out when and where the local flea markets are held. Flea markets are microcosms of the communities they serve. They’re not just about shopping and acquiring objects, but about people, food, history and economics. They’re endlessly renewable museums of popular culture, different each time you visit--and they’re one of my favorite ways of discovering a city’s secrets, of learning what makes a place unique. Some of my most vivid and intense memories of travel, in fact, are of my expeditions to flea markets--for never is my gaze as concentrated as when I’m scanning an array of diverse and unexpected objects, responding to them intuitively, trying to decide whether or not I want to purchase something and maybe live with it forever. (“Just looking,” indeed!) And I approach both flea markets and the cities that contain them with the same motto: “I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I’ll know it when I see it.”

IT WAS IN PARIS THAT THE PHRASE FLEA market was coined. City ordinances in the mid-1880s drove the ragpickers of Paris, something like 30,000 of them, outside the city limits. These sharp-eyed scavengers, who made a living out of things other people had thrown out, chose to settle in the small town of Saint-Ouen, just outside the Porte de Clignancourt. Here, they set up a market to sell their wares of old furniture, dishes, bric-a-brac, books and clothing. As the clothing was often flea-ridden, the place quickly earned the name “Marche aux Puces” or “Market of the Fleas.”

Today, more than 100 years later, the original Marche aux Puces still stands. A far cry from the original shantytown of casual stalls, though, it now covers about 75 acres and is subdivided into half a dozen independently owned submarkets and filled with permanent stands that are virtual antique stores, glamorously fitted out. (Rents are not cheap, and some leases have stayed in the same family for generations.) About a third of the dealers exhibit their wares on card tables and blankets, but the days when a shopper might discover a bit of Lalique crystal or an Impressionist drawing for a song are long gone. (The Marche aux Puces is open to the public only on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays--but the dealers here buy from each other on Fridays, and you can be sure that few sleepers escape their experienced eyes.)

The flea market at the Place de Clignancourt is a sentimental favorite of mine. I visited it regularly during my student years in Paris, and I still treasure two items I found there then: an ashtray in the shape of a camera that was an advertising giveaway for Kodak in the ‘20s and a small round wooden box with a top of sunflowers in hammered metal. I also harbor regrets that I didn’t snap up the many pieces of Clarice Cliff and Susie Cooper pottery that used to be for sale there for prices so low that they would be positively laughable today, now that these artisans have been “discovered.”

As much as I like the original Marche aux Puces, my favorite Paris flea market is the infinitely more manageable one at the Porte de Vanves, at the edge of the 14th arrondissement. Here, there is a combination of permanent stalls with licensed vendors and amateurs selling odd assortments of items spread out on a blanket or two. This is the Parisian equivalent of the garage sale, a phenomenon otherwise unknown in the city, and amazing bargains can still sometimes be found. (There are also stands selling hot dogs, crepes and such--and on at least one occasion, one stand featured a man playing music-hall songs and light classics on an old upright piano.)

Much of the merchandise at the Porte de Vanves belongs to the category that might be called “20th-Century collectibles.” Browsing here not long ago with my Swiss architect friend Simon, a fellow flea-market fanatic, I fantasized fitting out the Paris apartment I don’t have with all the very well-priced 1950s furniture we found. In reality, though, I ended up succumbing to some simpler, less expensive and more portable items--two heavy glass decanters (the kind cafes bring, full of water, with your Pernod, to dilute it to the proper thin, milky consistency) with crisp labels in bright primary colors reading “Pernod 45 Liqueur” and “Pastis 51” (about $4 each), a juice glass labeled “Joker Le Bon Jus de Fruit” in red block letters, very Deco, and a double-shot glass emblazoned “Ricard” in graceful blue script (both a couple of dollars each).

I speak adequate if obviously accented French, but flea market business is done in many languages--and I noticed a number of dealers eager to practice their own English skills. When they have no language in common with their customers, they sometimes pull out a pad and pencil to write down prices.

One thing flea markets are nearly always stocked with is boxes of old post cards--which Simon and I love browsing through. A good general rule is to avoid buying post cards of the city you’re in--for some reason, they tend to be high-priced--but at Vanves, since ordinary modern-day post cards were setting us back $1 or more apiece, the lovely old post cards of Paris we found seemed almost like bargains at a couple of dollars each. I found an almost complete set of sepia cards from the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs (where the term Art Deco was coined)--and when I pointed out that the set was missing one card (out of 21!) the price was knocked down considerably. I ended up paying less than $2 a card. Another post-card set, a dozen strange views of the Catacombs of Paris, many of them depicting carefully stacked human bones, were a good buy at about $10. Looking through stacks of other kinds of paper ephemera, Simon came across a number of old architectural magazines, some French, and one great find--a Russian review with copious photographs of some Le Corbusier-inspired workers’ housing in Warsaw, which Simon had recently visited.

My major purchase on that trip to Vanves was a strand, more than two feet long, of old amber beads in fat, seed-like shapes, beautifully mottled, with the cord carefully knotted between each bead. By playing “good cop, bad cop” (Simon conveniently became the boyfriend-holding-the-purse-strings who was reluctant to pay--which he wasn’t), we got the price knocked down from well over $50 to about $40. (I’ve seen less splendid strands in antique stores in Los Angeles for more than twice the price.)

THE MAIN FLEA MARKET IN ZURICH, SWITzerland, on Burkliplatz at the end of the Bahnhofstrasse (by the Quai Bridge, where the Limmat River flows into Lake Zurich), is larger than Vanves--it fills a small park and spills over into adjoining streets--but shares the informal feeling. Here, Simon and I found an abundance of Machine Age home appliances--Bakelite radios, streamline moderne irons, futuristic electric fans, even hefty vacuum cleaners from an earlier, heavier era. (European electrical appliances won’t work as is in the United States, of course, but they can sometimes be adapted to American specifications. In any case, these were mostly so pleasing to the eye that they could have been bought just as decorative objects.) We also saw lots of antique luggage, in leather and otherwise--hat boxes, Vuitton satchels, doctors’ bags, steamer trunks--and a good many beautiful old (manual) portable typewriters, which in a sense are both appliance and luggage combined. I especially lusted after an immaculate Nile-green portable Hermes “Baby,” with matching Nile-green leather carrying case, for about $90. (I’m kicking myself for not getting it.) Simon and I briefly fantasized about cornering the portable typewriter market, in fact: I would send him $1,000 when I got back to the U.S., and he would go back to the Burkliplatz and snap up every one he saw. Then we thought about how we’d ship them, where I’d store them, who we’d sell them to. . . .

The first thing I actually ended up buying here was a more easily packable version of one of those streamline irons--a small but heavy toy iron made of red painted wood and silver metal, for which I paid about $11. (I now use it as a paperweight--and, as purchases of this kind are apt to do, it has since inspired the acquisition of similar items from other flea markets.)

I had seen very little plastic jewelry, for which I have a fondness, at the Porte de Vanves, but here in Zurich there was an abundance of it--from stylish ‘30s Bakelite and good-quality ‘60s pieces right up to lightweight contemporary stuff. The prices were unbelievably low, so I bought quite a lot of it from many different stands, often paying as little as $1 a bangle. I secured my real prize, though, from a grubby, superannuated hippie with long hair and a scraggly beard who sold me a number of bracelets for $1 each--but separated one out and said he had to have more for it because it was “special.” Indeed it was, a piece in black-and-cream plastic with a vaguely zebra-esque pattern, decorated with four metal studs. It’s now one of the prizes of my entire collection--and the price we had settled on for its “specialness” was a whole $2.

But it was at Burkliplatz, too, that Simon and I made our biggest error: We passed up an amazing Rosenthal china coffee-and-tea service in a sophisticated ‘30s green-and-purple pattern, complete with elaborate porcelain strainers, being offered for about $130 by some very young kids done up in a sweet, Swiss version of punk (dyed Mohawks, tattoos, multiple earrings), none of whose other merchandise was up to it in quality. We didn’t buy it because: a) We didn’t have enough money--and even if we could talk the kids down to about $100, which we thought we could, that would use up all the money we had, and we still had half the market to do; and b) We figured it would be too much trouble to ship. By the time we came to our senses, a scant 20 minutes later (more money could be extracted from a cash machine; Simon could keep the china for me until we could work out the shipping), someone else had spotted our china and snapped it up. We mourned. It became the flea-market equivalent for us of “the fish that got away.” But it was our fault. We had violated one of the basic rules of flea-marketing: Buy it when you see it.

IN THE ELS ENCANTS MARKET ON THE PLACA de les Glories Catalanes in Barcelona, Spain, I found myself flea-marketing alone, with no knowledge of Spanish and in violation of two more fundamental flea-market rules: Take your time, and don’t go with a shopping list. In this case, I was in a hurry (squeezing in a quick bit of shopping before meeting my traveling companions elsewhere), and I was looking for something specific: At least a decade ago, a friend of mine returned from Spain with a number of beautifully printed, vividly colored miniatures (about 3 by 5 inches) of film posters for American movies of the ‘40s--originally used as promotional handouts in the streets, the way ads for massage parlors or nail salons are now pressed upon you as you attempt to navigate the streets of Manhattan. My friend had bought all that one dealer had, for what she remembered as about a quarter each. Something of a film buff myself, I already possess my share of one-sheets and lobby cards--and even a set of English cigarette cards featuring movie-star photos and bios--but something about those Spanish miniatures, featuring the films of everyone from Donald Duck to Bette Davis, haunted me, and I had decided that if they were to be found at Els Encants, I’d buy them.

Thus, I moved more rapidly than I like to from one dealer to another in my search--along the way picking up a small, modern reproduction of an old French wine poster ($5), the original of which I wish I’d bought many years ago when I saw it in a San Francisco gallery for $300; an odd plastic pin of a horse head hanging by a faded silk cord from a jockey’s cap ($5) and a new cloth-and-plastic fan with a striking modernistic design of green-and-red balloons ($4). I passed many dealers of antique clothing, stacks of beautiful lace mantillas and the currently highly fashionable bed linens trimmed with embroidery and lace--and I wished that I had more time (and money). But I didn’t find my miniature posters.

A few days later, though, I was on the other side of Spain in San Sebastian, attending that city’s annual film festival. Killing some time between two screenings in a residential neighborhood near the Velodrome, I turned a corner and stumbled upon a smallish flea market. And there were my miniatures. Alas, this wasn’t a dusty pile for a quarter each: These had been matted, not terribly carefully, some of them singly and some in ill-assorted groups of four. They were priced at about $10 per miniature--too steep for me even if I could have rescued them undamaged from their cheap matting.

Oh well, I told myself. At least now I knew where they could be found. That’s what I thought, anyway, until I got back to L.A. and tried to find out the exact location of this little flea market for future reference. The Tourist Office of Spain had never heard of it; my colleagues who go to Spain all the time had never heard of it; a friend of a friend in New York, who comes from San Sebastian and returns there frequently, assured him categorically that such a market does not exist. “The people of San Sebastian are very proud,” she told him, “and they don’t like the idea of buying things that have been owned before.” Imagine that.

POSTCRIPT: LAST MONTH, AFTER WRITING this story, I found my elusive Spanish miniature film posters in a cinema bookshop in Toronto. I bought as many as I could afford, including those for “The Red Shoes” (“Las Zapatillas Rojas”), “The Shanghai Gesture” (“El Embrujo de Shanghai”), and “I Wake Up Screaming” (“Quien Mato a Vicky?”). I also asked the owner of the bookshop where he had found the cards. “Oh, mainly in Barcelona,” he replied. “Mostly at the flea market.”

GUIDEBOOK: WHERE TO FLEA

Paris: Marche aux Puces, Porte de Clignancourt, open Saturday, Sunday and Monday; individual dealers may open anytime between 9:30 and 11:30 a.m., and close about an hour before dusk. Regulars recommend coming early Saturday morning for finds, late Monday for bargains. Take the 4 Metro line to Porte de Clignancourt, then walk under the underpass to the Rue de Rosiers. Porte de Vanves is open Saturday and Sunday, theoretically from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., but in practice some dealers open as early as dawn and close up when they feel like it. Take the 13 Metro line to Porte de Vanves, then walk about one block south to Avenue Marc Sagnier.

Zurich: Burkliplatz is open Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (though here, too, dealers often open and close earlier), from May 1 through September 31 only. Walk down the Bahnhofstrasse (the city’s main shopping street) from the central railroad station, about a dozen blocks.

Barcelona: Els Encants, Placa de les Glories Catalanes, is open Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, from dawn to dusk. Take the 1 Metro line to Les Glories station, then walk around the square to the north side.

A good all-around guide to flea-marketing in France is “Manston’s Flea Markets, Antique Fairs and Auctions of France” by Peter B. Manston ($9.95), published by Travel Keys in Sacramento and distributed by St. Martin’s Press.