Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from house Stuff Works dot com, where
Speaker 1: smart happens him Marshall Brain with today's question how much
Speaker 1: is an autograph worth? And this question comes up because
Speaker 1: there was a recent case where a person who had
Speaker 1: received a personal letter from President Obama had sold that
Speaker 1: letter to an autograph dealer and was able to sell
Speaker 1: it for seven thousand dollars. So the story is she
Speaker 1: had written to Obama, just a letter like people right
Speaker 1: to the White House all the time, but this one
Speaker 1: caught a staffer's attention and Obama had read it and
Speaker 1: he had written back to her with a nice little
Speaker 1: note on White House stationary and his signature. And it
Speaker 1: turns out that this kind of thing is not common.
Speaker 1: That is a very rare occurrence. So it's not often
Speaker 1: that a person has a personal note from the president
Speaker 1: with his signature on it from the White House. And
Speaker 1: so she got into some financial straits and needed some cash,
Speaker 1: so she went to a dealer and she sold this
Speaker 1: note to the dealer for seven thousand dollars. And presumably
Speaker 1: he'll go out onto the open market and he'll sell
Speaker 1: it for more than seven thousand dollars. So we could
Speaker 1: say that the handwritten signature of a sitting president with
Speaker 1: a nice note on White House stationary is worth something
Speaker 1: more than seven thousand dollars. So that brings up the
Speaker 1: obvious question how much are the signatures of other living
Speaker 1: people worth in comparison to that? And to get an
Speaker 1: answer to that question, we can go over to a
Speaker 1: website called Mademan dot com and it had an article
Speaker 1: called the ten most valuable autographs of living people. And
Speaker 1: if you look through that list, it lists Neil Armstrong
Speaker 1: as the person with the most valuable signature at So
Speaker 1: that means that Obama is setting a new record here.
Speaker 1: But below that is people like Steve Jobs at five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars, Tiger Woods at eight hundred dollars, Bob Dylan
Speaker 1: at dollars, Paul McCartney, J K Rowling, Elizabeth Taylor, you know,
Speaker 1: people like you've heard of. And this this tells you
Speaker 1: something about the value of autographs is that the person
Speaker 1: usually has to be somebody who's widely known and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, additionally needs to be someone who isn't spreading
Speaker 1: their signature around everywhere. So for example, J. K. Rowling
Speaker 1: doesn't really sign things anymore. You won't see her at
Speaker 1: a book signing just giving her signature away a thousand
Speaker 1: times a day, and that makes the signature more valuable.
Speaker 1: But if you think about it, two thousand ish dollars
Speaker 1: for Rowling signature isn't really that much money in the
Speaker 1: grand scheme of things. If you want to go for
Speaker 1: really big amounts of money, you have to look at
Speaker 1: autographs of famous dead people. And at the top of
Speaker 1: that list goes William Shakespeare, because there's only six known
Speaker 1: copies of his signature anywhere in the world, and he's
Speaker 1: an incredibly famous person. Just about everybody on the planet
Speaker 1: has heard of Shakespeare, and you know, you could probably
Speaker 1: find a wealthy English major who would pay a lot
Speaker 1: for one of those signatures. Next on the list is
Speaker 1: former President Lincoln. Stuff that he's signed is pushing up
Speaker 1: toward a million dollars a pop. So how could you
Speaker 1: use this knowledge to your advantage. Here's what you would
Speaker 1: need to do. First of all, you would need to
Speaker 1: not give out your signature, so get in the habit
Speaker 1: of not doing that, so there's a very small number
Speaker 1: of your signatures out in the world. Then sign a
Speaker 1: couple of things, put them in a safe and leave
Speaker 1: them for your great grandchildren to find at some point
Speaker 1: in their lives, then become incredibly famous for some reason,
Speaker 1: and then die. And then what's going to happen is
Speaker 1: over the years, because you were incredibly famous and you
Speaker 1: didn't sign very many things, those couple of signatures you
Speaker 1: left for your great grand show ldren are going to
Speaker 1: be incredibly valuable. Be sure to check out our new
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