We’d all love to own one of the most valuable celebrity autographs of all time.
If these prices held true then just one of these signatures could be a life changing sale.
And most will have increased in value since their sales were recorded.
But why are these small scraps so valued?
They’re all relics of historically important personalities.
There’s no doubting their authenticity.
And they’re rare. Unique in their own way.
And it matters where they are, and what they are on.
A setting for a signature may have its own historical importance.
Or simply tell us something about the signer.
The autograph market is vibrant and often hard to read.
We help you make sense of it with our own PFC40 index of autograph values.
Why a particular person’s autograph becomes more sought after than another is a question with no clear answer.
We know death plays a role. It’s the definitive end of the supply of new signatures if nothing else. And, it adds a mystique: it's Lennon not McCartney, Cobain not Grohl.
Factor in media attention, anniversaries, movies… these can all feed into the trends that help make this market.
It’s endlessly fascinating. And a superb extra dimension to the hobby of collecting autographs.
For now, here are the 10 most valuable celebrity autographs of all time.
10 - Jesse James signed photograph $52,000 (£41,190)
Dig a tiny distance beneath the legend created around Jesse James and things start to get ugly pretty quickly.
That hasn’t stopped him becoming an American legend, and a highly collected Western icon.
In 1876, four years before “the coward Robert Ford” shot him, reportedly in the back, James stopped into a Nashville photo studio for a snap.
He signed it, and this incredibly rare artifact raised $52,000 in 2011.
9 - Jimmy Page guitar $55,000 (£43,531)
A guitar like this would raise a few thousand dollars without the signature.
The felt-tipped pen wielded by Led Zeppelin founder Jimmy Page raises it to the level of greatness.
It’s a Gibson Les Paul, but it’s not a vintage band-played instrument.
It’s a signature model made in homage to Page by Gibson. Page signed 25 of the first production run of the model, elevating them to record-breaking levels at the auction sale in 2004.
8 - Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio baseball $191,200 (£151,330)
Inseparable for a while, Marilyn and Joe were a celebrity couple for the ages.
Joltin’ Joe, the Yankee Clipper, was just about the top sportsman of his age when he married Marilyn in 1954, as she rose to the height of her Hollywood fame.
But the marriage didn’t last long. Joe was jealous, and may have been physically abusive.
They divorced after 9 months, and that puts a premium on an item like this, sold in 2006, to an unnamed fan of the pair.
7 - Albert Einstein “tongue out” photograph $125,000 (£98,935)
Image: Los Angeles Times.
Albert Einstein stuck his tongue out at Arthur Sasse.
No big deal. Except Sasse was a photographer and captured what has become the archetypal image of the great physicist.
Endlessly reproduced in an age where capturing an image is the work of a second, originals still have a particular value - over $40,000 in 2014. And when you have a signed image you’ve hit gold.
One was sold for $125,000 in Los Angeles in 2017, matching the price achieved for a different version of the image, also signed by the German born scientist.
6 - John Lennon Double Fantasy Album $900,000 (£711,336)
Tragedy haunts many of the great names in this list, but none is as close to disaster as this item, signed by John Lennon - for his killer - hours before he was murdered.
Double Fantasy, a joint release with his wife Yoko Ono, was to be the ex-Beatles last release. Lennon was working on the next when he stopped to sign a record for a fan. That fan was Mark David Chapman, who just hours later would shoot the singer as he returned home.
The album was bought by the record’s producer, Jack Douglas, who sold it for $400,000 in 1999, giving the receipts to charity. An auction reportedly reached $525,000 in 2003, and in 2020 the fateful album was sold through a New Jersey auctioneers who reported a final bid of $900,000 had met the reserve
5 - Button Gwinnett letter $722,500 (£571,505)
Having signed the Declaration of Independence, US revolutionary leader Button Gwinnett ordered an invasion of the part of Florida controlled by the British. It went badly. There was a row, and Gwinnett was shot dead in a duel with the officer who had led the invasion, Lachlan McIntosh.
Bad news for Gwinnett, a Gloucestershire-born man of Welsh descent, but good news for anyone who had his signature.
Gwinnett’s signature is probably the rarest of the Founding Fathers who signed the 1776 declaration. It’s possible that others will be found, but the best current guess is that there are 51, and 40 of those are in institutional collections.
A letter from Gwinnett was declared the “finest” of his signatures when it was sold at auction in 2010. Someone agreed, and was willing to pay nearly three-quarters of a million dollars for it.
4 - Babe Ruth contract $1,020,000 (£806,830)
The unnamed buyer who paid over $1 million for a 1918 contract didn’t fork out that amount to get the signatures of Ban Johnson and Harry Frazee, respectively a baseball official and the owner of the Boston Red Sox.
No, this was all about the Babe, who signed up to play for $5,000. The following year, despite a reported three-year deal worth $27,000 Ruth was sold to the New York Yankees in a trade that still rankles in Boston to this day.
The contract has historical significance. Ruth was a big star and signed thousands upon thousands of autographs, many on baseballs, but this document dwarfs any other signature from perhaps the greatest baseball player of all time.
3 - John Hancock letter $1,040,000 (£822,650)
John Hancock’s name is synonymous with signatures. If an American asks you to give your John Hancock they want you to sign something.
Hancock’s name sits - big, clear, and beautiful - at the foot of the “unanimous declaration of the thirteen united states of America”.
The first signature on the Declaration of Independence has almost mythic weight to American buyers.
No surprise then that a fine Hancock-signed letter concerning the declaration raised over $1 million at auction in January 2023.
2 - The Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln $3.7 million. (£2,926,737)
Everything comes together in a perfect storm with this autographed document.
It’s a momentous historic document, the proclamation to end slavery in the United States.
It’s well documented. Lincoln signed 48 copies of the document.
This copy was owned by Rober Kennedy, another victim of assassination.
Most of the 26 known surviving proclamations are in institutional hands. When they sell, they sell for a lot: $750,000, $2 million.
And this one sold for $3,700,000 when RFK’s widow, Ethel, sold it in 2012. It was bought in London in 1964 for $9,500.
1 - George Washington documents $9.8 million (£7,753,466)
So many firsts attach to Washington’s name it seems only right to put him at the top of this list.
The documents themselves are very special, and would be valuable without the signature of the first president of the United States.
Washington’s own copy of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the proceedings of the First Congress, were signed by their owner.
The buyer was appropriate: the trustees of the great man’s estate, who coughed up at a sale in 2012 to put the book in the Washington Presidential Library.
It will almost certainly never be sold again, but whether this record will stand is another question.
These pieces represent the very top of the autograph tree.
But, almost anyone can get started in autograph collecting and trading. For many of us, it’s just the price of a stamp to write to a hero.
And who knows where it might lead.
While some of these signatures are very rare in themselves, most owe their stellar value to the particular resonance of that particular item.
You can buy many legendary signatures for much less.
And we can help you.
Have a look around our online store, or contact me now on info@paulfrasercollectibles.com and +44 (0)1534 639 998 to discuss your plans.
