Sotheby's Hamiltonia Sale

Last week Sotheby's held it sale of Alexander Hamilton documents and letters, a total of 77 lots, and it brought $2.6 million including buyers premiums.  The Hamilton sale had a pre sale estimate of $1,371,500 to $2,115,000. Most of the other Sotheby's Americana Week sales appear to have done OK, mostly within the estimates and toward the low end of the estimates. More on those sales later in the week.

It certainly seems like an opportune time to sell the Hamilton document collection with the great interest and success from the Broadway play.

The NY Times reports on the Hamilton sale at Sotheby's

It’s official: Alexander Hamilton now out-earns his boss.

That, at least, was the verdict of one expert who was bidding at Sotheby’s on Wednesday, when a trove of Hamiltonia fetched $2.6 million.

“Hamilton has exceeded the value of George Washington with this auction,” John Reznikoff, a dealer from Stamford, Conn., said after the hammer dropped on the last of 77 lots of letters and documents, which had been held by Hamilton descendants for more than 200 years. “If you compare letters with comparable content, Hamilton’s now cost more.”

The auction was notable not just for the prices but also for the first-time bidders (and gawkers) it drew, including 11-year-old Zack Pelosky of Manhattan, who was wearing a navy blazer over a Hamilton T-shirt. “It’s from the New-York Historical Society, not the show,” Zack told a reporter afterward, though he noted that he had seen the musical three times.

He had been going for a low-ticket item — a lot containing manuscript copies of letters by George Washington and George Cabot — but was edged out by a telephone bid of $1,500.

“I was trying to give you a quick hammer,” Selby Kiffer, the Sotheby’s specialist who conducted the auction, told him later. “But that mean lady on the telephone jumped in.”

Several dealers said the auction was a test for the Hamiltonia market, which has been booming since the musical started performances in 2015, but had suffered from a lack of supply. (Javier Muñoz, who is currently incarnating the founding father of the ten-dollar bill, had come to see the items before the sale, but any cast members who may have attended the auction were well disguised.)

Things shot into the six figures early, when a 1777 commission making Hamilton aide-de-camp — “one of the most consequential documents in American history,” Mr. Kiffer said — sold for $212,500, including the buyer’s premium. A draft manuscript for one of Hamilton’s Pacificus essays, which Mr. Kiffer had identified amid a jumble of papers in a folder, went for $262,500.
If the price for that last item fell short of the estimate, it was also a great afternoon for items that tugged at the heartstrings, like a letter from Angelica Church Schuyler, Hamilton’s sister-in-law, discussing the death of his son Philip in a duel. It sold for $50,000, more than 10 times the estimate.

“I said to a friend, there’s no way that someone who saw the show made that estimate,” said Joanne Freeman, a historian and Hamilton expert at Yale University. “The price for that Angelica letter — what a thing.”

Some in attendance expressed regret that the collection was sold in pieces, rather than going intact to a research collection. But some archives, like the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, bidding through the dealer Seth Kaller, did prevail on a number of items.

Alas, it turned out to be the room-too-expensive-to-happen for Ms. Freeman, the author of “Affairs of Honor,” a study of dueling culture. She bid on a fragment of a will Hamilton had drawn up in 1795, before a near-duel, but found herself outgunned.

She also lost out on a letter from Hamilton to Eliza, asking her to send a legal brief he had accidentally left at home. “I know Hamilton so well, and he’s so forgetful,” Ms. Freeman said. “So I have a personal connection with that document as well.”

Source: The NY Times