A sale of Action Man and Star Wars figurines, along with accessories including playsets, costumes and vehicles, sold for a record £180,000 ($256,800) in an auction held by Vectis Auctions of Thornaby, Teeside, UK, on 27 May 2015. The collection was sold by retired toy sales rep Doug Carpenter, who had been allowed to keep the stock when manufacturer Palitoy ceased trading in the 1980s – it had been languishing in his garage ever since.
The hundreds of pieces auctioned included a Princess Leia doll, which sold for £3,600 ($5,136), and a rare Action Man judo outfit, which sold for £6,480 ($9,245). Even an empty cardboard box in which Star Wars figures had been packaged after production fetched £160 ($230).
Palitoy was a well-known toy brand in the 1980s. As well as Star Wars and Action Man, it produced the Care Bears, Mainline Model Railways and Tiny Tears dolls. Palitoy closed its manufacturing business in 1985.
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History of Auctioneering
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In 1956 Texas Auctioneers Association (TAA) held it’s first organizational meeting in Dallas, Texas, twenty-eight auctioneers were present. Since 1956 the Texas Auctioneers Association has been actively promoting and enhancing the auction method of marketing through education, public relations and information sharing.
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The Washington Auctioneer Association, established in 1976, is a professional association designed to address the ever-changing needs of the auction industry at the state level.
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The most expensive prop gun sold at auction is a BlasTech DL-44 Heavy Blaster, made for the character of Han Solo in the original Star Wars trilogy. The gun, the only survivor of the three originals made for A New Hope in 1976, sold for $1,057,500 (£904,342) at Rock Island Auctions in Illinois, USA, on 30 August 2022.
The prop gun was one of three “hero props” (high-detail master versions, used for close-ups and publicity pictures) assembled by London props house Bapty in 1976. The basic components of the blaster prop, chosen by Star Wars set decorator Roger Christian and assembled by armourer Carl Schmidt, are a World-War-I-era Mauser C-96 “Broomhandle” pistol (that had been previously adapted to fire blanks), the flash-hider from a World-War-II-era MG81 machine gun, and an early twentieth-century rifle scope made by Hensoldt-Wetzlar. To this functional model were added various bits of “greebling” (surface detail), including parts from a model aircraft motor, to make it look more futuristic.
As the gun and its parts were only rented from Bapty, the gun was returned when filming was completed, where it was stripped of its greeblies and disassembled. Star Wars was not a big-budget or high profile production, and the gun had already been used in several high profile movies. It was only in 2010 that Terry Watts, the new owner of Bapty, asked Carl Schmidt to dig through his decades of miscellaneous parts bins and reassemble the gun.
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The highest price paid at auction for an artwork created using artificial intelligence (AI) is $432,000 (£334,144), paid for a “painting” called Portrait of Edmond de Belamy on 25 October 2018. The portrait (of an imaginary person) was created by a type of AI called a Generative Adversarial Network, which was set up by members of the French art collective Obvious Art.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) work by pitting two neural networks against each other to develop new images based on a library of existing images (in this case a dataset of 15,000 portraits painted by artists between the 14th and 20th centuries).
In the Obvious Art collective’s GAN algorithm, which was based on the work of open-source AI programmer Robbie Barrat (USA), one network (the generator) was tasked with iteratively generating images based on the pre-existing data set, while the other (the discriminator) was tasked with identifying the generator’s work. The process concludes when the generator can create images that the discriminator cannot distinguish from the paintings in the original dataset. The striking end result vastly exceeded its auction house estimate of $7,000–$10,000.
The applications of GAN are many and various, but it is the intriguing way in which the AIs in the GAN build up an independent understanding of the world they see through pictures; this is truly independent from the ‘taught’ perception of machine vision we have today and will benefit the likes of automated vehicles in the future.
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Cover art for a special edition of Tintin in America sold for a price of 1.3 million Euros (£1m; $1.6m) to an anonymous bidder at an auction event held by the Paris-based auction house Artcurial in June 2012. The art, made in 1932 by Tintin creator Hergé (the pen name for the Belgian Georges Remi), depicts the young journalist Tintin in cowboy attire eating with his dog Snowy as some Native Americans creeps up behind him. The same piece of artwork, which was created in Indian ink and gouache, sold for just 764,000 euros when it last came up for sale in 2008. A spokesman for the successful bidder said at the time “If he’d have been able to get it for less I think he (the bidder) would have been happy. The aim was not to beat a record; the aim was to obtain the work, before anything else… You don’t come here to beat the world record, to spend money, that doesn’t make any sense.”
According to press reports the cover is one of only five remaining ink and gouache originals by Herge. Only two of which are in private hands.
Tintin in America has featured a number of covers over the years.
Tintin made his debut in Le Petit Vingtième, the children’s supplement of the Belgian Newspaper Le Vingtième Siecle, in 1929 with the first episode of Tintin in the land of the Soviets.
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The most expensive NFT artwork sold through an open-edition auction is “Merge” by Pak, which was on sale from 2 to 4 December 2021. Instead of a single NFT for the artwork, the artist continually minted new “units of mass” representing a share of the artwork over the 48 hours the piece was on sale, creating as many units as there was demand for. By the time the sale concluded, Pak had sold 312,686 “units of mass” with a base price of $575 (the price rose progressively as the sale went on) to a total of 28,983 buyers, earning $91,806,519 (£69,206,141).
After the sale had concluded, a unique NFT was minted for each buyer with the details of their accumulated “mass”. The NFTs use dynamic smart contracts which are designed to gradually reduce the number of tokens available – each time a user with a Merge NFT buys another user’s Merge NFT, the new token is merged with the existing one, increasing the buyer’s “mass” but reducing the number of NFTs on the market.
The price was a record for an artwork sold publicly by a living artist, according to Nifty Gateway. However, the claim is debatable, depending on whether The Merge is ultimately considered to be a single piece or a series of artworks. It may be considered a series of artwork because each and every “mass” is an NFT and represents a piece of the artwork.
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A pair of 1972 Nike Waffle Racing Flat “Moon Shoe” sneakers sold for $437,500 (£351,426; €391,554), including premium, at Sotheby’s in New York, USA, on 23 July 2019. The unworn shoes were hand-made by Nike co-founder and Oregon University track coach Bill Bowerman, and only a handful of the original batch of 12 pairs are left in existence. The purchase was made by Canadian entrepreneur and collector Miles Spencer Nadal, who is planning on displaying the sneakers – plus another 99 pairs acquired in the sale – at his Dare to Dream Automobile Museum in Toronto, Canada. The sale was curated by Stadium Goods, a US-based premier sneaker marketplace, and the lot was sold by Jordy Geller, the Guinness World Records title holder for largest collection of sneakers.
Mr. Nadal purchased 99 pairs of sneakers in a private sale prior to the public auction for the Moon Shoe. The Nike sneaker was held back in order to be placed into public sale, but Nadal purchased it too. The prototype sneaker is considered an historic artefact in the history of sports. According to Sotheby’s, “Bowerman was first inspired to create the innovative waffle sole traction pattern found on the brand’s early running shoes by tinkering with his wife’s waffle iron and pouring rubber into the mold to create the first prototype of the sole.”
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The most expensive pocket watch sold at auction is the Henry Graves Jr Supercomplication, a gold, double-dialled watch crafted by hand between 1925 and 1932 by Patek Philippe of Switzerland. On 11 November 2014, the watch was sold for 23,237,000 Swiss Francs (£15,154,312; $24,073,532) at Sotheby’s in Geneva, Switzerland.
The watch measures 74 mm (2.91 in) in diameter (the same width as a typical smartphone) and is 37 mm (1.45 in) thick, including the domed glass covers on the front and rear faces. Despite its relatively compact size, it weighs 536 grams (1 lb 2.9 oz), which gives an idea of how densely packed the internal mechanisms are. It was sold in its original tulipwood box, inlaid with a mother-of-pearl panel featuring the arms of Henry Graves Jr (1868–1953) – the American banker who commissioned the piece in 1925.
The name of the piece is a reference to Graves’ desire to have the most “complicated” watch in the world. (In horogical terminology, a “complication” is any feature that a mechanical timepiece can perform in addition to telling the time. Common complications include calendars, phase-of-the-moon displays and stopwatch functions.)
The Supercomplication required three years of study in astronomy, mathematics and precision mechanics before a viable design could be finalized. The enormously elaborate mechanism uses 900 individual parts including 430 screws, 110 wheels, 120 various movable parts and 70 jeweled bearings. It took the artisans at Patek-Phillippe – assisted by several other prominent Swiss watchmakers acting as sub-contractors – more than five years to assemble the watch, finally delivering it to Graves on 19 Jan 1933.
The 24 “complications” of the watch include a star chart (calibrated to show the night sky over Graves’ Manhattan apartment on any given night) and a multi-year calendar that will be accurate until the year 2100, as well as various alarm and stopwatch functions. This number of complications remained unbeaten until 1989, when Patek-Philippe released the 33-complication “Calibre 89”. It remains, however, the most complicated watch to have been made without the assistance of computers.
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