Private Sale
Honus Wagner near-mint T206 tobacco card
Reported price: $2.35 million

To most people, it’s just a little piece of cardboard, only 1-1/8 x 2-5/8 inches, encased in an ugly plastic slab. A little piece of 98-year-old cardboard with a colorful picture of an old-timey baseball player.

But to serious baseball card collectors, it’s an icon worthy of solemn veneration: the hobby’s Holy Grail.

So just how much veneration does the only known near-mint T206 Honus Wagner card inspire? Would you believe $2.35 million worth?

Let us bow.

Okay, now get up. And let’s get real here. What’s the value equation for this scrap of old cardboard? How does this kind of price happen?

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Rago Arts and Auction Center
March 10, 2007
Frederick Rhead ceramic Arts & Crafts vase
Estimate: $40,000–$50,000
Price fetched: $516,000

Quick. Name the father of Fiesta ware.

Yeah, ok. Neither could I.

Well, his name is Frederick Rhead and one of his rare, earlier (non-Fiesta) vases just broke the world record for American art pottery at the Rago Arts and Auction Center on March 10. The price for this 11-inch piece of clay? $516,000.

Nope. Not a misprint. A half-million greenbacks.

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Greetings and salutations! I wish I could say that I haven’t been posting for the past few months because I was enjoying a palm-shaded idyll on a Caribbean island, sipping umbrella drinks, practicing my back stroke and reading chick-lit. In reality, I have been laid up after major surgery, resting, reading and plowing gleefully through the first two seasons Lost and Grey’s Anatomy on DVD.

I was hoping to score Dr. McDreamy here as my surgeon, but ….. (cue record needle screeching violently across vinyl) ….. dang! he was booked solid! My surgeon was amazingly skillful, though ….. and I’m getting back on my feet far faster than I imagined. If you live in the New York metropolitan area and are in need of surgery, I highly recommend Columbia University Medical Center: it’s exceedingly well-run, with a strong compassionate, people-first vibe.

But I have been trying to keep an eye on the collecting markets and am backed up with items to post. Stay tuned!

Everyone dreams of it: Sneaking away from a tag sale with an undiscovered Rembrandt. Digging something out of your attic that is valuable enough to pay off your mortgage.

Well folks, keep on dreaming because it does happen.

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Back in May of this year, Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers sold a lovely flower picture by French realist Henri Fantin-Latour for an impressive price of more than $1 million. Now, however, authorities have announced that the work, titled Bouquet d’Hiver, was stolen property.

Before coming to Shannon’s, the painting was reportedly sold to an antiques dealer for the measly sum of one hundred dollars. While Shannon claims to have followed all standard business procedures, like checking with the Art Loss Register, the painting was not on their list of stolen or missing works. Why not? Because Bouquet d’Hiver wasn’t reported stolen until some four months after Shannon’s May sale, when the painting’s rightful owner returned home from Europe and discovered it missing. According to New London, CT., newspaper The Day, the picture was swiped from a shed by a handyman while the homeowner was abroad. Charles R. McDougal, 44, has been charged with the crime. Shannon’s has assisted authorities in locating both the painting and its consignor, and has stated that the European client who purchased the work will be fully refunded.

Big artist, big painting, big bucks. Allegedly, Hollywood entertainment mogul David Geffen has sold a 4 x 8 foot drip painting by Jackson Pollock for the record-breaking price of $140 million. The previous “highest price ever paid” record was set back in June when Ronald S. Lauder purchased Gustav Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” for a staggering $135 million.

Ever since Lauder set the bar crazy high, various big spenders seem eager to outgun him and earn bragging rights to the “most expensive painting ever” sale. If Steve Wynn hadn’t poked his elbow through the canvas of his dreamy Picasso, Steve “how conspicuously can I consume today” Cohen was reportedly ready to scoop it up for the sum of $139 million … but Geffen seems to have broken even that would-be record. Funny how that Klimt sale seems to be all of a sudden driving so many other artists’ valuations to record levels.

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Readers of the Forbes Collector newsletter may remember that E. Forbes Smiley made our 2005 list of top scandals that rocked the collecting world. Why? Back in June, the former rare map dealer, a resident of Chilmark, Mass. (seen in his booking photo, above), pleaded guilty to a federal charge of major artwork theft, after having stolen at least 98 rare maps since 1998 from institutions around the U.S. and U.K., including the New York Public Library and the British Library in London. Smiley slipped up and was finally nabbed in June of 2005, during a visit to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Seems he dropped an X-Acto knife blade on the floor of the rare document reading room.

The map thief’s version of a smoking gun.

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Woe to the Stevie’s. Who knew that an errant elbow would send a colossal art deal into the crapper?

Looked to me like a fight for bragging rights. Two of the biggest “Look at me! I can spend obscene amounts of money on art!” collectors—hotelier Steve Wynn and hedge funder Steven Cohen—appeared ready to best Ronald Lauder’s record price for a work of art ($135 million, paid this summer for a picture by Gustave Klimt) by all of $4 million. Word has it that Cohen had long coveted Wynn’s Picasso portrait of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter entitled Le Rêve (”The Dream”), a 1932 masterpiece, and the two reportedly had drawn up a contract for $139 million, brokered by Wynn’s dealer William Acquavella.

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Borgs be damned! When it came to the Star Trek memorabilia sale at Christies, resistance was futile. Fans set paddles to “bid.”

To mark the 40th anniversary of the cult TV show’s debut, Christie’s held the first official auction of Star Trek items last weekend, all from the CBS Paramount Television Studios vaults. The three-day event saw more than its share of pointy ears and Vulcan greetings, and at least one bidder who came dressed as Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Enthusiasts spent more than $7 million, more than double the auctioneers’ expectations.

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Museums and would-be art donors are taking it on the chin. In late August, President Bush signed a provision attached to the Pension Protection Act that puts new limitations on the giving of fractional gifts. (Gnarly details here.) Before the addition of this provision, donors were not required to part with the donated work of art at a particular time, and tax deductions could be extended over a number of years. Each year, an institution would gain a larger portion of the given item. Art collectors and donors enjoyed the open-endedness and flexibility of fractional giving because it enabled them to take advantage of the tax deductions that come with charitable giving without having to fully give up a cherished object before a time of their choosing.

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