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