At the beginning of the month, a toy depicting Santa in his sled sold at auction for $161,000, making it the most expensive American tin toy sold in over fifteen years as well as the most expensive toy auctioned in the world in the past three years.
Sold as part of James D Julia‘s Annual Summer 2010 Auction (which itself raked in $2.1-million) the Althof Bergmann Santa was described by the auction house as: “The rarest and most important of all early-American tin toys.”
The auction centred round the Malcolm Deisenroth collection which fetched $1.04 million, far exceeding the pre-sale estimate of $870,000.
Another highlight of the sale was an all-original Caille upright double slot machine which went for $80,500.