Christie's auction

[Tom Jennings]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 shoppa_classiccmp at trailing-edge.com wrote:

> Some of the items are unique objects and artifacts, I can see these
> maybe getting the expected $.  But many/most of the items are just
> books or journals with articles by famous people.

I'd love to have a copy of that rag that turing's '38 paper was
first published in. Hundreds or thousands of copies were made.
Probably (almost) all were thrown out. I look for stuff like this,
it's ephemera, now non-existent.

Turing spoke on the BBC (1950's), more than once; no copy of his
voice is known to exist, anywhere, in any context. People have
seriously searched. Thousands of people heard him, no one can
produce a copy!

Just as a for-instance.

> people, even most average techies don't subscribe to these academic
> journals, but there's at least tens of thousands of copies of many
> of these journals, mostly in libraries or in professor emeriti's bookshelves.
> How can something like this be expected to be worth many hundres to many
> thousand dollars?

Find one, and Sotheby's will find a big bucks buyer from you, if
you can prove it's not a fake, etc.

The weirdness is not in what you can imagine, but what you CAN'T
imagine.