Presidential Collectibles in Honor of Presidents Day

Good morning, Collectors. 

Collecting is a great connector, not just to the past or to a passion, but oftentimes to those we love. Mantel community member Cory lost his father in 2020 and inherited his dad’s massive collection of sports cards. Still raw with grief, Cory and his wife Anna stowed the boxes out of sight until just a few weeks ago, when they cracked a binder to reveal an incredible collection. A 1933 Jim Thorpe. A 1958 Jim Brown. A 1981 Joe Montana. Boxes and boxes of unopened packs. 

Today we’re proud to share Cory and Anna’s story, and we hope you join us as we follow their journey on Mantel and Instagram. With so many boxes and binders left to explore, this story is only just beginning. 

Collector’s Item

Auction Houses love to capitalize on a theme, so given we started the week with Presidents Day, numerous sales featuring presidential autographs and ephemera have taken place over the past few days.  

Presidential collectibles can run the gamut from inexpensive to kitschy to historic to macabre, and the sales from this week checked every box as sellers looked to capitalize on the holiday.

Autographs from presidents, especially if the signature came from when they were in office, are some of the most prized historic John Hancocks (who, of course, was not a president). Case in point, in a sale earlier this week, RR Auction sold a collection of presidential autographs featuring every Executive in Chief from George Washington to John F. Kennedy for $43,161.

If you’re curious about which president’s autographs fetch the highest prices these days, PSA has a guide worth checking out. Hazard a guess on the president with the priciest signature? William Henry Harrison, whose autographs from during his presidency can fetch 6 figures. Why? Because he only served in office 31 days before passing away due to illness. 

Auction items tied to the death of former presidents also command high prices at auction given their historical significance. For instance, in the same sale from RR Auction, a bloodstained swatch of a bandage used on Abraham Lincoln, originally obtained by a young War Department staffer, sold for $44,240 (doubling the estimated sales price). 

And yesterday Bonhams auctioned off a schedule from the day JFK was assassinated, annotated by special assistant to the President, Dave Powers, that includes his minute-by-minute recollections of November 21st, 1963. A very powerful piece.

Odds are, with this being an election year, more presidential auctions are coming. And as Ken Goldin (who sold a three-language ship pass issued by George Washington earlier this week for $18,300) wrote on X.com, with the United States celebrating its semiquincentennial in 2026, there will be increased interest in documents and signatures tied to the early years of the country's history. 

We’re hoping that means more items like our favorite from the Bonhams sale- a spoon with a silver-plated hinged mustache guard custom-made for Grover Cleveland.

Penny Thoughts

• Taking things from Autographs to Autoglyphs, in one of the biggest NFT sales in recent memory, earlier this week a set of 10 Autoglyphs from Larva Labs sold on Fountain, an art brokerage platform, for 5,000 ETH ($14.5M) to an anonymous bidder. The art advisor who brokered the deal, Amanda Schmitt, described the pieces as the “cave paintings of on-chain generative art, and they earn that name both in their primitivism and simplicity, but also in the huge leap forward they established.” If nothing else, the Autoglyphs established that the NFT market is continuing to rebound after the 2022 crash and subsequent Crypto Winter. 

• Speaking of crashes, a racecar that placed 13th in the 1971 Indy 500 sold at auction for $7,750 on February 2nd. Why so cheap? Well, the ride ain’t exactly driveable anymore. The car, driven by Mike Mosley, was involved in a nasty wreck that sent Mosley to the hospital with a broken leg. As a Get Well Soon present, chief mechanic AJ Watson crushed the car into a tidy cube and gifted it to Mosley. Given the metal cube is mostly sharp metal edges at this point, we hope the ‘car’ gets shipped to the winner with some heavy-duty mechanic’s gloves too.

Mantel Update

We’re a week in and the feed on Mantel is packed with community members sharing their favorite items and discussing the latest news from the world of collectibles. We’re sharing some of the best across our social channels, like this post from a member who recently acquired a Thank You note from Albert Einstein to a 5th-grade class, or this post from a UK-based member with a deep love for the St. Louis Cardinals, who packs his desk with cards and memorabilia from the team to infuse a little extra joy into the workday. There’s something for everyone on Mantel- from the hardcore collector-investor to someone just starting to explore the world of collectibles. So please come check out the site if you haven’t visited in a while, follow us @onMantel across our social channels, and join our growing community.