Strikingly uncomplicated in appearance, a gold pocket watch with a sweep hand and two movements smashed records for a Breguet at Christie’s Geneva auction yesterday when it sold for $4.7m. The Breguet Museum in Paris beat out all bidders. The museum also bought a second watch for $2.8m, the second highest price ever paid for a Breguet.Widely admired for his innovations, Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747‐1823) designed watches for European royalty. Christie’s reported there were bidders from 42 countries represented at the auction, including those who scooped up the two rare Breguets for the Museum.
Museum Buys Berguets For Record Price
May 15, 2012
Lincoln’s Eyeglasses In Auction
June 17, 2013Clear-eyed as Abraham Lincoln might have been, he still needed spectacles. The ones he carried in a 1865 portrait taken in Washington, D.C. by Alexander Gardner are currently up for sale in an online auction at Nate Sanders. Provenance comes in the form of a 1977 letter by his great grandson, Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith,, who found them in a trunk in the attic of his grandfather, Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln. Bidding currently stands at $52,855 in the auction ending June 27, but it’s expected to go much higher.
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Coke Smuggling Yacht Sold At Irish Auction
June 17, 2013The Louise was a 65-foot luxury yacht loaded with 3,000 pounds of nearly pure cocaine stashed below decks when UK border agents in Southampton boarded with sniffer dogs. The coke went to the government. The owner went to prison. Louise went to auction where she just sold in Belfast for $277,000. On the street, the drugs were worth nearly a half-billion dollars.
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A Million In Gold Falls From Attic
May 30, 2013You can’t make this stuff up: U.S. gold coins (497 to be exact) rained down from the ceiling when a workman was renovating an old grape drying barn in Les Riceys, France. They’re worth a million, or more. Sotheby’s is selling the whole Champagne Lanson Bonnet “Vineyard” collection at its rare coins auction next month in Los Angeles.
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Rising Value of Unrestored Cars
By Malcolm Welford, Vintage Car Specialist
