Super-rare Steve Jobs autos should command thousands at auction

A trio of autographs from a tech icon are on the auction block and the potential demand -- and the estimated values -- might surprise you.

The signer? Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who by many accounts wasn't interesting in signing autographs. The former CEO and chairman helped bring the Apple Mac, iPod and iPhones to life along with plenty of other iconic gadgets before he died at age 56 in 2011.

“Identifying Jobs as a reluctant signer is a major understatement,” said Steve Sloan, vice president of PSA/DNA, which authenticated all three pieces in an upcoming RR Auction sale. “And for us to be able to authenticate three of his signatures inside of a month is truly a rarity.”

Boston-based RR Auction has three signed Jobs items in its next auction with the signed Mac OS X manual above the cheapest of the three with an opening bid of $1,000. Also up for grabs is a signed newspaper clipping relating to an iPhone release at $2,500 and a job application from 1973 that opens at $5,000 with a super-clean and small signature.

But those are modest openers.

That application? It's estimated to sell for more than $50,000 by the auction house. The manual? It's estimated to fetch more than $25,000. The framed clipping is expected to fetch $15,000 or more. According to PSA/DNA, a past signed Newsweek magazine cover sold for more than $50,000 last fall.

“Steve Jobs’ signature is remarkably simple when one considers his brilliance and creativity, and his simple-style cursive does match well with the simplifications that marked many of his innovations as it related to making computers and devices user-friendly," said Kevin Keating, PSA/DNA’s lead authenticator. “There is nothing, however, structurally significant or creative about his signature which remained quite consistent during his adult life. Like other autographs, the value [of his] is largely a direct product of available supply vs. demand. As a habit, Jobs did not sign autographs, thus the enormously small number of authentic items that are now in circulation.

"There appears to be no end to the increasing interest in Jobs, which will continue to drive interest in his autograph and make his name a good autograph investment for the foreseeable future. For now, the high prices realized at auction are helping to draw out more material, but those same prices almost certainly will elicit more fraudulent attempts by unscrupulous individuals trying to score with forgery attempts. For every real Jobs’ [autograph] we see, we continue to see a number of fakes.”

The auctions will open on March 8 and run for one week -- click here to view them and learn more.

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