Auction

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.

Designed by computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart and licensed by Apple at the dawn of the personal computing era, the early three-button "X-Y" mouse is a rare and important piece of history.

A rare piece of cyber history that helped usher in the modern computer age is going up for sale as RR Auction's Steve Jobs + Apple Auction offers a functioning Apple-1 computer from the 1970s, complete with its original box signed by Steve Wozniak.

Eric Clapton often auctions off his music gear to help fund the Crossroads Centre in Antigua, and it's from the first in mid-1999 that Lot 103 was sold. Dubbed Slowhand, it's now available again, with bidding kicking off at a million bucks.

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.

Austrian bikes have always been world-class and prior to WW2, the Puch name was the pride of Austrian mobility. One bike in particular has emerged as an auction block star with its outstanding engineering and exceptional rarity: the Puch 800 V-four.

Take one visibly unstable three-wheeler from the 1970s, and give it five times the horsepower and 200+ km/h (124+ mph) top speeds thanks to a screaming superbike motor ... This truly frightening, roided-out Bond Bug has just gone up for auction.

An almost-complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton has sold for over US$30 million. Nicknamed Stan, the rex was the star attraction in Christie’s Evening Sale of 20th Century Art on Oct. 6, and it's fetched the highest amount ever paid for a dinosaur fossil.

One of the largest, most complete and most famous Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons is about to go under the hammer. The dinosaur, nicknamed “Stan,” has been on display in the Black Hills Institute for decades, but will now be auctioned off by Christie’s.

In the midst of a global pandemic the success of Gooding & Company’s “Passion of a Lifetime” auction on the weekend seems like a miracle. Eight cars topped US$1 million and $45,231,210.76 was realized in just 90 minutes … at just over $500,000 a minute.

It has been a remarkable week in the collectible motorcycle industry, with many important motorcycles selling at Bonhams' Bicester Heritage Auction, with two others being sold in Monterey. Here's our summary of the major sales and non-sales.

So far this year, there hasn't been a car sold for eight figures, but one auction to be held at the Concours of Elegance on September 5, 2020 could see three cars all surpass that mark inside two hours.