Collecting Presidential autographs and documents is a gripping pastime that can require some serious financial investment. For example, a signed portrait of Abraham Lincoln would generally cost you - should you be lucky enough to find one! - somewhere in the region of $25,000. A signed letter from Lincoln or his signature on a legal document would generally cost you less - unless the document was of particular historical importance. Even a plain example of the 17th President's signature would retail at between $3000 - $4000. Prices for Abraham Lincoln are generally surpassed by those for George Washington, 1st president of the United States. Expect to pay $20,000 for a signed letter written entirely in Washington's hand - a plain signature could make as much as $5000. Anything in the hand of Washington's successor, John Adams is also scarce and desirable - with a signed autograph letter capable of making as much as $15,000.Locating signatures for our most recent Presidents is not such a difficult, or expensive, task. A signed portrait of Ronald Reagan, for example, should not cost much more than $300. If you want to amass a truly spectacular collection however - it may prove wise to ignore the more standard autograph material and try instead to focus on items with unique association qualities. In the case of Reagan, I recently saw a signed colour photo of him delivering a speech at the Berlin Wall - the inscription in Reagan's hand is the clincher though - "Mr Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall!". Expect to pay something like $10,000 for recent Presidential items with such distinctive association qualities. Similarly, any hand-written items by Roosevelt referring to his polio - a subject he was usually reluctant to discuss or write about - or by Nixon regarding his resignation, are especially rare and desirable. Prices for John F. Kennedy are not as high as one might expect - a letter signed by JFK will cost about $4000 although a letter signed by Lee Harvey Oswald will make double that.
Collections of presidential signatures and documents are almost uniformly single in nature, and only in recent times have combined signatures of living past presidents, sometimes along with the current president, been created. At times this has been accomplished when the presidents meet together for funerals or celebratory events, and sometimes it is laboriously accomplished by sending a document from one signator to another, a risky sort of round-robin collection.
The 1989 document offered in this collection is rare indeed, and in a significant touch, Nixon, the only president to resign following impeachment, has signed under the Presidential Seal. It was created for the occasion of the bicentennial of the American Presidency, and was presented in New York City where George Herbert Walker Bush commemorated the first inauguration of George Washington in that city.
The signatures were obtained over a several month period by an executive with the Weekly Reader organization, as presidents visited New York and Washington. Only two such documents were created, and were made on a large poster commemorating the bicentennial of the Presidency. This rare document is offered by one of the winners of a national Weekly Reader contest. The winners wrote a letter of advice to President George H. W. Bush as if it had been written by George Washington, and a copy of this winning letter, along with all documentation, is included in this offering.
