I own a boutique furniture store in Alexandria VA and one of my very long time customers used to be quite the Aston Martin collector. When he heard I bought a Vantage last month, he stopped in and had some yarns to tell men about the Astons that passed through his hands, most of which are simply too good not to pass on....

* He once owned the Serial Number 1 DB5. First one off the production line that he brought in from Germany. He told me he paid something like $ 8,700 for it and then sold it for $ 9,300 a few years later to a collector in Europe so it went back across the pond. He thought he did well on the money at the time.

* He also owned a DB4 with a GT engine, a factory lightweight, I believe he said. He didn't pay much for it, and took it up to Steel Wings outside of Philly for a look at fixing it up. The owner there said "The Car is a mess and will cost quite a large sum of money" to fix it up. He did not have that large sum of money, which was far beyond what he anticiapted! So the Steel Wings owner said he had a sure buyer for it - some guy in England. The English collector called him up and said "name your price", but he wasn't sure what to ask for it and stammered around until the gentleman from England said "How about this - you go to the Aston Martin dealer and pick out any new car they have and I'll pay for it." And that was the deal.

* Quality control on the old cars was horrid he tells me. They didn't care how the cars were made and they leaked oil like mad. He told me one day he had to remove the rear seat on his DB5 and discovered lots of crumpled up 1964 British newspapers shoved into the seat crevices. Apparently that was how they fixed squeaks and rattles back in the day.