Amazing Auctions
A New York surgeon placed the winning $12,713 bid on Thursday for a September 1966 edition of the magazine Datebook signed by John Lennon. The magazine contains Lennon's infamous remark that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
Courtesy of rrauction.com
A signed copy of Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' manifesto sold for $34,900 at an Aug. 13 auction in England. The buyer was an anonymous telephone bidder. The book was written in 1924 while Hitler was serving a four-year prison term. This copy is believed to be a second edition given by Hitler to a fellow inmate in 1925.
Barry Batchelor, PA / AP
One of the original prints of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out at photographers sold for $74,324 at a New Hampshire auction on June 20. When Einstein signed the print, pictured here, he wrote that his gesture was aimed at all of humanity.
RR Auction, LLC. / AP
A rare stamp bearing the likeness of Abraham Lincoln was auctioned off for $431,250 on June 13 in New York City. The item, known as the "Ice House Cover" because the envelope it's on was mailed from Boston to an ice house in India in 1873, was stolen from its owner's safe in Indianapolis in 1967 and turned up 39 years later at a home in Chicago.
Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries / AP
A rare stamp showing Audrey Hepburn smoking sold at auction May 26 in Berlin for $93,800 -- more than double the minimum bid. Only five copies of the stamp are known to exist. Most of them were destroyed after Hepburn's son refused to grant copyright for the image in 2001.
Fritz Reiss, AP
This rare 7.03-carat blue diamond fetched a record $9.49 million when it was auctioned off in Geneva on May 12. Sotheby's said it was the highest price ever paid for a gem of its kind. The flawless item was unearthed last year at the historic Cullinan mine in South Africa.
Martial Trezzini, Keystone / AP
This 1804-dated Adams-Carter silver dollar is one of only 15 known to exist from a never-circulated group. The coin, which sold for more than $2 million in a private sale two years ago, fetched $2.3 million at an auction in Cincinnati on April 30.
Heritage Auction Galleries / AP
This rare two-seat version of a World War II Spitfire fighter sold for $2.53 million at an auction in London on April 20. British adventurer Steve Brooks, who paid the record price for the plane, told London's Daily Mail he believes "things like this were built to be used."
Alastair Grant, AP
A daguerreotype believed to be from 1848 shows a stately home in what is now the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The image, one of the world's oldest photographs, was sold for $62,500 to an unidentified buyer March 30 at Sotheby's in New York.
Sotheby's / AP
Apparently the recession even applies to dinosaurs. This complete 150-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton, right, failed to sell at an auction of prehistoric relics in New York on March 21. The 9-foot-long dryosaurus, joined here by other fossils featured in the sale, had been expected to fetch up to $500,000.
Josh Chait, I.M. Chait Gallery / AP
