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Sotheby's Internet Offering  Of
Declaration of Independence
Brings Record Sum

(Click To Enlarge)

One of only four copies in private hands out of a total first printing of just twenty-five known, Sotheby's Auction house expected the rare document to sell for million of dollars.  It sold for more than eight million dollars in a day-long internet auction.

According to Sotheby's:   "By many estimates it is history's most important printed document.

The story of its discovery is nearly equally as amazing:

" In 1989, a Philadelphia man was browsing at a country flea market in Pennsylvania. He bought an old torn painting - only because he thought he might use its frame. The price: four dollars. Once home, he took the painting apart and saw that the frame was unsalvageable. Behind the canvas, however, was a folded document. Though he recognized it immediately, he imagined it to be a 19th-century reproduction of little value but kept the document as a curiosity. Two years later, a friend persuaded him to have Sotheby's evaluate it.

"It took one second to know it was right," recalls Sotheby's Executive Vice President David Redden, one of two experts who traveled to Philadelphia to examine the property. "Here was the most important single printed page in the world in the most spectacularly beautiful condition."

Sotheby's sold this copy of the Broadside in 1991 for more than $2.4 million, at the time a record for printed Americana. Today, not ten years later, the same lot has a high estimate of more than three times that price. "What price Liberty," indeed."