GUEST: My grandmother brought this book from Italy when she moved here in 1980. It had been in our family for, I would say, 150 years, slowly collecting autographs from various famous people.
APPRAISER: Now, where do you think some of them came from?
GUEST: My family owns a hotel in Sorrento. They owned one in Florence in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and I believe that a lot of these signatures are from people that were their guests.
APPRAISER: But you can't absolutely say, but you think that's where.
GUEST: I... my grandmother was pretty sure, but I still cannot prove either... any of this.
APPRAISER: This book is absolutely cram full of autographs of well-known, famous people: authors, scientists, musicians. Now let's open to one page in particular. Here, now you have a Steinbeck.
GUEST: So that is John Steinbeck's note, and it's particularly written for this book. It says about being in illustrious company in this book, so my grandmother was positive that he knew about the book and was happy to be a part of it.
APPRAISER: Whether they were guests at the hotel or friends of guests or acquaintances, they obviously got autographs and they pasted them and put them in.
GUEST: They did.
APPRAISER: Let's look at the next page. And again, there are all sorts, but I thought these three... You have Leo Tolstoy, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, and just many, many. I mean there are way, way more than we could possible show.
GUEST: Absolutely.
APPRAISER: Now, have you done anything on value or looked up any?
GUEST: I have had this book appraised by a large auction house, and the gentleman basically told me it was worth nothing.
APPRAISER: Worth nothing. Well, that I'll tell you I'll disagree with. I'm not quite sure what they had said. I don't see how they could have come to that conclusion. This book is worth thousands of dollars. I mean you have some spectacular autographs. There's Verdi, there's Zola, there's Edison. I would say a retail price, selling it as a book, would be a minimum of $25,000 to $35,000.
GUEST: I was curious as to... if we take some of these signatures out, would that have any relevance on the value?
APPRAISER: It would probably have a lot of relevance on the value. Now, it would be sort of really nice to keep the collection together as a collection. But if you're looking at it purely monetarily, the collection is worth way more as individual items. So if you took these apart... Now, I'll also point out one thing, too, is a lot of this is done back-to-back.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: So it would be an expense on the ones that don't come out easily to have a conservator remove them. So that would add cost to it. But I would estimate that if you took these apart one at a time, that $25,000 to $35,000 retail might turn into a $50,000 to $75,000 retail, and maybe even more, because there's no way we have time here to look at each individual... So your grandmother gave you a great gift. Thank you for bringing it.
GUEST: Thank you so much. It was my pleasure.
