A Week of Ancient Books, Gnomes and Thievery

Cue those soothing piano notes, Collectors. Happy Masters weekend.

Augusta National has rolled out a plethora of collectibles surrounding this year’s tournament, and among the hottest items are small garden gnomes. Lines for the $50 souvenirs start well before dawn, but the investment could be worthwhile – gnomes from previous years have sold on eBay for as much as $4,000.

Another trending item is incredibly specific to this week: solar eclipse glasses. Many, of course, have already hit eBay, selling for between $45-$75 apiece. With the next total solar eclipse not hitting the US until 2044, you might be wondering who’s buying these glasses today. We recently covered the passionate community of glasses collectors, and well, these could be right up their alley.

All week folks on Mantel have been geeking out on golf-related collectibles, (and not just gnomes and eclipse glasses), so if you’re a fan of A Good Walk Spoiled, come on over and hang. 

Now let’s tee off.

Collector’s Item

This week, Christie’s announced they’ll be auctioning off one of the oldest books in human history, and final bids are estimated between $2.6M - $3.8M.

The Crosby-Schøyen Codex is one of the earliest examples of a legitimate, published manuscript. What does this mean to collectors? Well, a codex is the first proper form of a book. Rather than scrolls of paper, a codex features stacked pages bound by stitching. 

The Crosby-Schøyen dates back to Egypt circa 250 A.D. but wasn’t unearthed until the 1950s. Thanks to its preservation in an ancient monastery, it remains in strong condition and features 104 pages of Christian writings. The codex was removed from its New York display on April 9th and is en route to London for a June sale. 

Sure, $4M is a big chunk of change, but it’s a fraction of the highest codex sales on record. The codex market became an international story back in 1994. The auction of Da Vinci’s “Codex Leicester” brought upon a public bidding war, with Bill Gates coming out the victor for a whopping $30M (~$63M in 2024). 

The Codex Leicester had unique appeal. This was an exclusive account of Da Vinci’s early ideas, a masterpiece of writing inaccessible to anyone except eyewitnesses (it had been in the hands of the Earl of Leicester for centuries). But Gates altered the codex landscape by scanning the manuscript, and uploading the pages onto the internet for the world to read. Since Gates’ actions, the text for most legible codex manuscripts have been made available on the world wide web (including the Crosby-Schøyen). 

Still, it’s incredibly rare that a physical, salvageable codex becomes available, and as such, the market’s legs remain strong: last year, the 792-page Sassoon Codex sold for a whopping $38M. History has taught us that bids from the Crosby-Schøyen could exceed expectations at auction.

Penny Thoughts

• Significant business moves in the collectibles world unfolded on Wednesday. Here’s the rundown: Goldin Auctions was sold by Collectors Holdings (PSA’s parent company) to eBay, and in turn, eBay sold their vault business to Collectors. When the deal is finalized, eBay and PSA will merge their vaults in a move that could streamline and simplify the collectibles market.

• Type-1 photos are having a moment, as evidenced by Heritage Auctions selling a Mickey Mantle Type-1 for $840,000 earlier this week, setting a new record for the market. This particular photo was used to help create three different Mantle baseball cards, including the ‘51 Bowman. The most coveted Type-1 photos serve as a unique connection to a specific moment in time, and of course, can cover more than just sports, like this Nat King Cole photo, spotted on Mantel.

• In 2014, nine of Yogi Berra’s World Series rings were stolen, and now we’ve finally heard the thief’s side of the story. Thomas Trotta would steal sports artifacts with a neighborhood crew, and often put the items to use (like wearing a game-worn Christy Mathewson jersey) before selling them on the black market. After being pulled over at a traffic stop in 2019, he was linked to an ATM heist that also tied him to other thefts (which included nabbing paintings by Pollock and Warhol). Trotta, who pled guilty to his crimes in 2023, was featured over the weekend on 60 Minutes, and it’s worth a watch. 

And finally, if you’re in NYC this weekend, our friends at Rally are hosting their largest activation to date in SoHo (details here), where a 1-of-1 Porsche designed by Daniel Arsham and Akira Nakai will be unveiled for the first time in the U.S. The Porsche will then IPO on Rally at $10 a share (for a $315,000 total market cap). 

If you hit up the event or grab a few shares, let us know, and as always, if you are enjoying this newsletter, please share it with your circle to help Mantel grow. Readers can sign up to get Above the Mantel each week here: https://mantel.beehiiv.com/subscribe.