Collectibles Facts

In 2011, a couple bought a box of textbooks for $10. Inside, they found a 25-cent bill signed by the president of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston, and subsequently sold it for $63,250.

Karl Kissner was cleaning out his late grandfather's attic in Defiance, Ohio when he found a dusty box. Inside were roughly 700 baseball cards from 1910 - including 16 Ty Cobbs and a Honus Wagner - in near-perfect condition, untouched for a century. The collection was valued at $3 million.

Tom Hanks owns more than 250 vintage typewriters and has been collecting since 1978, when he bought a Hermes 2000 in a Cleveland repair shop for $45. He regularly gives them away - to typewriter repair shops, fans who write to him, and a bullied 8-year-old Australian boy named Corona who wrote to him during the pandemic. He even built a typewriter app that hit #1 on the App Store. One machine at a time, he is putting them back in the world.