Collectors trek to all corners of the globe for rare finds, from diplomatic tags to the devilish 666; the Vatican City holy grail
Some people dream of scaling a peak or writing a novel. Ethan Craft wants to collect at least one license plate from 500 global jurisdictions.
The quest has taken the 27-year-old across the world in search of junkyards, antique stores and other collectors willing to trade plates.
It also nearly killed him.
The Phoenix native and freelance journalist was recently driving through South Africa’s rural Eastern Cape in a rickety Renault Kwid hatchback when he swerved to avoid debris, slammed into a rock wall and flipped over. Craft avoided major injury. As important, he was able to recover the dozens of plates that spilled onto the road—along with the tag on his rental car.
“I’m going to save that one for my will,” said Craft.
Stamp collectors are called philatelists. People who save coins are numismatists. License plate collecting is so arcane that there isn’t a word for it. But there are thousands of people who so covet tags that they are willing to travel to remote corners of the globe—sometimes at great expense and personal risk—to score a rare find.
Some collectors focus on geographic regions. Others target tags based on design or color. Numbers are big draws, too, namely low ones, birth dates, the devilish 666 and the code for marijuana, 420. Some seek out diplomatic tags or presidential inaugural ones. Others pursue early porcelain plates or those from countries at war.
Tags from Vatican City are a holy grail for plate collectors. For enthusiasts of early American plates, it doesn’t get much better than a 1921 Alaska tag, one of which is rumored to have changed hands for $60,000.
There is a market for humorous plates that call to mind the “Assman” tag meant for a proctologist that instead went to Kramer in an episode of “Seinfeld.” In Maine, where vulgar plates were outlawed in 2021, bidding wars erupt when a good one comes up for sale.
The Super Bowl of plate collecting takes place in July at the annual convention of the 3,000-member Automobile License Plate Collectors Association. This year’s event, in Tulsa, Okla., marks the gathering’s 70th anniversary.
Craft’s obsession began at age four on road trips with his dad, peering out the back seat window to see how many different state tags he could identify. He later used a disposable camera to shoot out-of-state plates at the airport and malls, collecting them in a scrap book. Craft’s parents took note. “One year, the tooth fairy left me a license plate instead of a couple of bucks,” he said.
Craft memorialized his South Africa mishap on his TikTok account, where he treats his 526,000 followers to lessons on why European plates have no mounting holes, the historical differences between tags from Zimbabwe and Zambia and what features reveal a Sri Lankan plate’s age.
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