Word: auction
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...folks in the Kentucky hollers, the Midwestern river valleys and Amish Pennsylvania probably did not think of quilting as an art but rather as a skill and source of pride. They certainly did not think dealers and collectors would someday gather at auction to pay tens of thousands of dollars for Grandma's handiwork. America's Glorious Quilts, edited by Dennis Duke and Deborah Harding (Macmillan; 320 pages; $75), assembles photographs of some of the finest examples of this varied craft. Country and patriotic themes dominate the 19th century pieces, although their combinations of colors and designs are hardly naive...
...price be put on the secrets of the universe? Sure, if the setting is Sotheby's Manhattan auction block. Last week a handwritten manuscript in which Albert Einstein laid out his "special" theory of relativity was sold to an unidentified bidder for $1.16 million -- a record for a manuscript at a U.S. auction...
...Government may not hawk goods like a job-lot auction house, but it is becoming quite a bargain hunter. Across the U.S., law-enforcement officials are enthusiastically confiscating property acquired through criminal activity or used in committing crimes. Such seizures have become a major police weapon for squeezing crooks, especially drug dealers. During fiscal 1986, federal marshals handled $550 million in confiscated cash and property under 130 laws, a fivefold increase since...
Christie's was not worried. The British auction house rented London's Royal Albert Hall last week, invited 3,000 guests and started the bidding at $3.6 million. Bids came by phone from two continents. Two minutes later, the gavel came down. Sold, for $9.8 million, the highest price ever paid for a car. The buyer, a London vintage-car dealer named Nicholas Harley, said afterward, "Structurally, it's a work of art. I look forward to driving it." Sure, but keep an eye on those hubcaps...
When the gavel came down and the auctioneer said "Sold," the standing-room- only crowd at Sotheby's in New York City gasped, and then broke into applause. Vincent van Gogh's 1889 masterpiece Irises had just been bought by an unnamed foreign bidder for $53.9 million, the highest price paid for an artwork at auction...