The rarest and most valuable autographs often don't come from the people you would expect.
Take William Henry Harrison, for example. A seemingly unimportant signature from the ninth president on a ship passport sold for $95,000 at University Archives on Wednesday.
Compare that to Babe Ruth, who might be among the most collected humans to grace the earth. However, Ruth was unique for his time, known for signing just about anything people put in front of him. Including baseballs. So many baseballs. A famous photo of the Bambino shows him seated on a couch, signing a baseball with hundreds more engulfing the room.
Heritage auctions has sold more than 2,000 Ruth-signed balls in the past 20 years, including over 140 in 2024 alone.
So, despite Ruth ranking atop the pinnacle of collectibility, it takes just a few thousand dollars to obtain a Ruth-signed ball. A fraction of the price paid for Harrison’s signature.
It’s clear supply is stronger than legend in this case. The opposite is true when it comes to Harrison.
While Harrison's brief presidency does not exactly loom large, circumstances have conspired to create one of the most valuable signatures in history.
Harrison fell ill of pneumonia shortly after his 1841 inauguration, dying a month later. Given the brief time he held office, signatures from Harrison as president are as rare as they come.
Though earlier signatures, such as from his role has governor of the Indiana Territory, are a bit cheaper than Ruth’s, anything from his month-long term in the White House is not merely expensive, but nearly impossible to find.
This $95,000 sale is no outlier. In 2015, another signed document, billed as “the rarest of presidential autographs,” with a mere 20 examples appearing in public auction since 1974 and just four in the prior decade, sold for $75,000. It’s believe there are less than 40 signatures from his time as president, many of which are in public institutions.
A 2002 sale of a Harrison ALS (autographed letter signed) to Robert Buchanan, formerly part of the legendary collection of Malcolm Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine, fetched $127,000.
For reference, a George Washington signature, signed as president, has sold for less than $40,000 in recent years.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.