A pigeon with a hole in its neck pecks at a plastic water bowl. Scroll. A woman, her face and hands coated in a shiny paste the colour of Vegemite, runs the back of a butter knife along her left cheek ...

There’s something almost magical about the hunt for treasure among other people’s castoffs, and at the Mississippi Flea Market in Ripley, that magic stretches across acres of possibility.

The Rutledge Flea Market in tiny Rutledge, Missouri, is the kind of sprawling wonderland that makes bargain hunters weak in the knees and collectors lose all sense of time and space. You know that ...