Less than four years since it last sold at public auction for $930,000, a July 1776 printing of the Declaration of Independence will sell at Sotheby’s with a pre-sale estimate range of $2 million to $4 million.
Known as the Goodspeed’s-Sang-Streeter copy, a reference to its provenance, the broadside was printed in Exeter, N.H., by New Hampshire Gazette printer Robert Luist Fowle.
After the first printings of the Declaration were created by Continental Congress printer John Dunlap following the ratification of the document, they were sent out to the colonies and were subsequently used by printers to reproduce their own copies.
According to Sotheby’s, only two other copies of Fowle’s printing have sold in the past century at public auction. It’s believed there are 10 copies extant.
“Even more than the Dunlap first broadside, the contemporary regional printings of the Declaration of Independence provide a tangible link to the birth of the United States,” the auction house wrote in its description. “Utilitarian and intrinsically ephemeral productions, all of the 1776 broadside Declarations are scarce, and in the marketplace they are increasingly rare.”
It’s estimated around 100 copies of 1776 broadside printings remain extant, with at least 79 held in public institutions, according to Sotheby’s.
A “vast majority” of Declaration broadsides printed in 1776 are in public institutions (Sotheby’s estimates the total is at least 79). An early printing of the Declaration, a rare hybrid between a broadside and newspaper printing dated to a week after the ratification, sold for $3.36 million at Sotheby’s in June.
Heritage sold another rare broadside, printed between July and August 1776, for $2.895 million in 2023.
With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration arriving in 2026, documents and manuscripts relating to the nation's founding are likely to come to the forefront, both at auction and in exhibition setting, possibly leading to an increased level of activity in the market.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.