There was a new record for any item sold in an online only auction at Sotheby’s when Friedrich von Hayek’s Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science Prize medal made £1.1 million. It led a white glove online only auction of 27 lots from von Hayek’s personal collection. More than 1,000 bids were placed on the 27 lots.
Elsewhere in the sale, von Hayek’s personal underlined and annotated copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, estimated at £3,000-5,000, sold for £150,000. The Presidential Medal of Freedom presented to von Hayek by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, estimated at £10,000-15,000, reached £112,500.
The auction brought in £2.04 million, quadruple the pre -sale estimate.
See post on antiquesandartireland.com for March 3, 2019.
The previous benchmark for the most valuable item ever sold in a Sotheby’s online-only sale was $800,000, achieved the only complete archive of Supreme skate decks ain private hands which sold to Vancouver Collector Carson Guo in January 2019.