Look At This Rare Beatles Memorabilia You Can Spend Your Life’s Savings On
To mark the 50th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the online auction house Paddle8 is hosting an auction of Beatles memorabilia all this week. Prize items include a show poster for a “Pop Festival” in Sweden from 1963, an early show for which the Beatles were tagged as “England’s Pop Gäng” and given equal billing with Joey Dee & the Starliters, a mostly forgotten group now notable for briefly including a young Jimi Hendrix on guitar (starting bid: $25,000).
There’s also the band’s first Grammy nomination plaque, for “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in 1964 (starting at $13,000), and one of the original cardboard cutouts used by pop artist Peter Blake to create the Sgt. Pepper’s cover ($48,000). For collectors looking to drop a little less dough, there’s ephemera like this slick Apple Records promotional dartboard ($3,750), and a handwritten postcard from Paul McCartney to a fan ($6,000). Rounding out the collection are several of archival photograph and slightly less rare and valuable tour advertisements than the Swedish poster, like the Nippon Budokan visual you see above ($16,000).
Unfortunately for those of us who are so cash strapped we can’t even afford the dartboard, this is the world of Beatles collectibles, meaning pretty much everything carries a hefty price tag. The cheapest items we can find are three colorful posters that don’t depict the Fab Four themselves, but were available for sale at the Apple boutique, a “psychedelic retail establishment” the band operated for a time in London. Those start at $500, and are expected to sell for $700 to $900. If you can’t afford any of it, looking at the pictures is always free. Bidding ends next week.
This story originally appeared on Spin.