Collectibles

The world-record price for a camping chair more than doubled this week when Christie's Hong Kong sold a 17th Century Chinese Folding Horseshoe-Back Jiaoyi for $8.5 million, far exceeding the highest price previously fetched by a Chinese Jiaoyi.

A previously unknown first edition copy of Nicolas Copernicus’ landmark scientific text, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), has sold at auction for £277,200 ($391,767).

Albert Einstein is the world’s most recognizable and universally loved scientist. So when a handwritten letter appeared at auction in which Einstein wrote his most famous equation in his own hand, it was logical that it should sell for a grand amount.

Video game revenues surpassed the music and movie industries a decade ago. Now there is growing indication that video game memorabilia will be equally as valuable as music and movie memorabilia.

A digital artist called "Beeple" is now one of the top three most valuable artists alive – in any medium – after he sold a JPG file of his work for US$69,346,250. Welcome to the crazy world of NFTs, and the internet's latest wild gold rush.

It's fair to say that 2020 was an outlier year in the auction marketplace. All of the big players faced battles getting their usual live auctions to happen, and records were continually broken for online sales as the world adapted to COVID-19.

One of the original circuit boards hand-made by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak for the first iteration "blue box" phone phreaking device in 1972 is going to auction, with an estimate of US$8,000 to $12,000.

Next week's Propstore movie memorabilia auction has some very important objets d'art from some of the biggest films of all time. A Darth Vader costume, lightsabers, stormtrooper helmets, one of the most important movie cameras of all time ...

What's a little slice of the Michael Jordan legend worth? The sneakers worn by the fabled basketball player when he smashed a backboard with a one-handed dunk in 1985 have sold at auction for $615,000.

Michael Jordan was unquestionably a once in a lifetime athlete. His outrageous gravity-defying achievements on the basketball court helped him rewrite the rules of athletic merchandise and now he is creating his own new reality on the auction block.

Significant space and science fiction memorabilia continues to sell well at auction, with the Space Suit used in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" selling for $370,000 and Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 Control Joystick selling for $370,000 at Julien’s Auctions.

The value of movie memorabilia is invariably linked to the importance of the film it comes from. This makes the upcoming auction of the space suit used in Kubrick's masterpiece potentially one of the science fiction auctions of the year.