OPINION | NWA EDITORIAL: A billionaire and a bidding war: Rare first printing of the U.S. Constitution is on its way to Bentonville

A first printing of the United States Constitution is displayed at Sotheby’s auction house during a news preview Nov. 5 in New York.
(AP/Mary Altaffer)
A first printing of the United States Constitution is displayed at Sotheby’s auction house during a news preview Nov. 5 in New York. (AP/Mary Altaffer)

"Even though the nation was much smaller than it is today, there were still a lot of people. There was no way to distribute a document of this size. This had to be printed via the Continental Congress, and this is what people in New York, people in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Rhode Island, Delaware read when they called their own conventions within their state to say 'Let's debate this. Do we want to sign up for this or not?' So, without this printing, we wouldn't have had a nation."

-- Selby Kiffer, international senior specialist, books and manuscripts, at Sotheby's

Last Tuesday evening, in the saleroom of Sotheby's in Manhattan, bidding started at $10 million.

It had been 33 years since anyone had the opportunity to buy the object up for auction. S. Howard Goldman, a New York real estate developer and private collector of American documents, paid $165,000 in 1988 for a first printing of the United States Constitution.

Two hundred and one years before Goldman's purchase, 39 delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the original product of their four months' work in Philadelphia's Independence Hall -- establishing the framework by which the people of the United States would govern themselves.

After that historic convention's conclusion, printers David Claypool and John Dunlap painstakingly set the type for the first printing of about 500 official copies, to be provided to the Continental Congress and taken home by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Thirteen of those original copies -- only two in private hands -- are known to exist today.

Back to last Tuesday evening: Cryptocurrency traders, a week prior, had come up with the idea of marshaling their digital currency resources for a chance to buy the late Howard Goldman's copy, valued by Sotheby's at between $15 million and $20 million. Within days, 17,000 contributors joined the effort, committing about $40 million, U.S.

The bidding went on for eight minutes. The second bid -- a gasp-inspiring $30 million -- came from Kenneth Griffin, a hedge fund manager and billionaire reported to dislike cryptocurrency. When the bidding stopped, he had committed $43.2 million, a record price for a document or book sold at auction.

Perhaps as shocking as the price is where Sotheby's says Griffin plans to first display his new acquisition: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.

A spokesman for the museum last week said it had no firm exhibition plans in place except that it will happen sometime in 2022.

To think a $43.2 million document printed in Philadelphia just a few days after George Washington signed the original will now end up in what was, until a little more than a decade ago, a ravine in Benton County, Arkansas, is astonishing.

All we can do is borrow a phrase from the great Ukrainian-American philosopher Yakov Smirnoff: What a country!

What’s the point?

A strange bidding war between a billionaire and cryptocurrency enthusiasts ends with a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution headed to Bentonville.

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