Document collectors love significant words.
But changing the world comes at a price. Usually measured in millions.
The written word is the foundation of human history - prehistoric literally means the time before written records.
Writing has a lot to answer for. This 14th-century picture shows a scribe battling with the demon of bad penmanship, but the words themselves have a huge impact.
Words on paper have inspired bloodshed beyond measure, and been some of humankind’s greatest achievements.
Here is a tiny fragment of that history in five documents that have sold at auction for huge figures.
What would you add?
The Hebrew Bible
A page from the Codex Sassoon, priceless words to many, in a form worth 10s of millions of dollars at auction. Image courtesy of Sotheby's.
Can you own the first Bible?
Not quite, but the foundational document of western Christianity - undoubtedly among the most significant documents ever written - is the subject of endless study and discovery.
Far too much to discuss in depth here.
The Bible (as most of us understand it) is a compilation.
And it takes in scriptures from an earlier, Jewish, tradition too.
Like the Hebrew Bible.
To some it is, or reflects, the word of God.
But human hands wrote it onto parchments and put them together.
Exactly how that happened is complicated and not fully understood yet.
The oldest, most complete version of the Hebrew Bible was sold in 2023 for £30.6 million ($38.1 million) at an auction in New York.
Relatively modern scrolls of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh. Scrolls like this are used in worship in synagogues today.
The Hebrew Bible is pretty much what Christians refer to as the Old Testament; there are scholarly and theological implications to how the document is named.
The document is called the Codex Sassoon after a previous owner, David Solomon Sassoon, whose collection was the biggest and best private collection of Hebrew manuscripts in the world.
It was written in the early 10th century, around 1,100 years ago. It is currently the oldest collection of all of the books of the Hebrew Bible and the most complete such copy.
It was bought by Alfred Moses, an American lawyer and former ambassador, who donated it to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Israel.
The document’s long journey to Tel Aviv takes in (what is now) Syria in the 13th century and a period of five centuries when it disappears from view, possibly hidden for safe keeping after the destruction of the town where it was last known.
Now it is in a museum collection it is unlikely it will ever change hands again.
Magna Carta
King John hunting. He's the cartoon baddy of English kings, partly because he so quickly jettisoned the agreements he made in Magna Carta.
The myth of Magna Carta might be more significant than its actual effects, which weren’t what they were believed for a long time to be.
For centuries, Magna Carta was held up as a list of rights that every Englishman (definitely not women, and there’s an extent to which Welsh and Scottish law exist separately in the document) could enjoy.
That’s still a not uncommon view.
But the reality according to historians since the 19th century is that Magna Carta was a deal between a king and a baronial class who threatened him and was more to do with power politics than universal rights.
Nevertheless, it is a foundational document of the British state and small parts of it remain in force in the UK (more of it in some former British colonies).
Drawn up in 1215, Magna Carta Libertatum ("Great Charter of Freedoms") was signed by King John at Runnymede. John died the following year.
A 1215 copy of Magna Carta now held by the British Library. A surprising number of this 13th-century manuscript survive.
This was a period of instability and the extent to which Magna Carta was accepted, adopted or enforced is not particularly clear.
But, fair jury trials, property rights, and protection from unlawful authority are in the document and are a thread running through British political and legal history.
Copies of the document itself are of course very rare now, though because of its practical importance the survival rate is pretty good for such an old piece of parchment. Most are in institutional hands, many in the Church of England.
The most valuable auction sale is of a copy of an exemplification (an official copy) made in 1297. It was sold by a Somerset private school to the Australian government for £12,500 in 1952. Most recently, it was bought by US tycoon David Rubenstein in 2007 for $21.3 million.
It is now on display in Washington DC, and as a foundational text of America’s idea of itself, Magna Carta has a whole second story to tell.
Shakespeare Folios
A famous head full of famous phrases that we still use today.
“The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
From a Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare gives us a line - often transliterated to “the purpose of art is to give life a shape” - that justifies his place in this list of illustrious and very capital-I important pieces of religious, state and scientific prose.
But we all need some poetry in our lives!
Shakespeare’s work has shaped the way we perceive ourselves and the way we talk about what we perceive.
To wear our heart on our sleeves here, in your heart of hearts you know no wild-goose chase is needed to prove Shakespeare’s enormous significance. It’s a foregone conclusion, all doubt melts into thin air.
Almost every phrase in that paragraph is a common idiom that originates in Shakespeare’s work. Extraordinary for a writer who died just over 400 years ago.
An example of a First Folio, a book that saved many of Shakespeare's words for posterity.
Just this week, a reassessment of a letter revealing more about William’s home life has made headlines.
And, our timing here is good if we’re to tip you off to future purchases.
If you have about £3.5 million to spare.
A set of the first four Shakespeare Folios is to be sold this month and that’s the top estimate.
Early Shakespeare Folios (the first collections of his plays) are a once-in-a-lifetime gem for any literary collector.
It’s possible more copies could be found. Early editions were printed in their hundreds and not all are accounted for.
The most valuable First Folio ever sold was auctioned for $10 million in October 2020.
The Constitution of the United States
The record-setting Constitution copy that's now on display in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Image courtesy of Sotheby's.
America’s founding documents are all highly collectible.
We’ve plumped on the Constitution because it is the most current and “living” of those documents and the most valuable copy is the most valuable document ever sold.
To it should be added the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, and probably the Articles of Confederation.
All much discussed to this day, and - because they helped create history’s greatest political and economic power - having an effect on your life whether you like it or not.
“We the people” opens the Constitution, a daring statement in 1789 and still a touchstone in US politics today.
What follows sets up the United States government in a form that is still recognisable in 2025.
There was a long journey to that document, which, in its clauses regarding slavery arguably contained the seeds of the Civil War around a century later.
An imagined signing of the Constitution in Philadelphia when 39 men created a whole new type of nation.
Twenty-seven amendments have attempted to make the Constitution fit for the country that has to live with it, the oldest, in-force governing document in the world.
The very first copy of the Constitution was hand-written by Jacob Shallus.
The copy that made the most was the $43.2-million example bought by financier Ken Griffin in 2021.
It was a printed first edition that was made for discussion at the Constitutional Convention and Continental Congress.
In a very modern touch, Griffin saw off competing bids from a crowd-funded crypto group.
The Theory of Relativity
Close up of the Einstein-Besso Manuscript explaining how Einstein found a new way to explain the Universe. Image courtesy of Christie's.
You can pop to a bookshop now and get a copy of Relativity: The Special and the General Theory by Albert Einstein. I found one online for about a fiver.
Or you can express it simply as E = mc2.
That’s the content that mattered.
The debate about the its significance is for other places (and better qualified authors), but perhaps the phrase “ushering in the nuclear age,” is the one that rings truest in the popular memory of the theory (in fact two theories produced around a decade apart).
Einstein is himself a fascinating figure. A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, a pioneer, a socialist, and a man deeply engaged with the real world. The cliched picture of the mad-haired scientist in a dream world couldn’t be further from the truth with Albert.
He also wrote a lot, and his letters are highly valuable, and many as important as his theoretical work, including the famous warning of a Nazi nuclear programme he sent to President Roosevelt.
The closest you can get to the actual Theory of Relativity is a very relative question.
There’s a 72-page manuscript that sold for $1.2 million in 1987 (then failed to sell in 1997).
In 2021 a set of notes called the Einstein-Besso Manuscript made $13.4 million in Paris against a $3.4 million top estimate. Auctioneers Christie’s called the 54-page document “the only surviving work detailing the genesis of general relativity in private hands.”
The mushroom cloud over the Nagasaki atomic bomb explosion.
So many historic documents
Five is a ridiculously small number.
And we’re all victims of the biases that come with our own histories.
There are whole religious traditions and languages - no Mandarin! - continents and periods of history excluded from this list.
No economics, no computing, no medicine…
Oh dear.
We’re happy to hear what you would include.
Buying historic documents now
And we’re happy to help you find the historic documents you covet for your collection.
