Gregor Mendel Signed Abbey Document Sold for $24,079

A rare document signed by Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel whose work laid the foundation for modern genetics has sold for $24,079 at RR Auction in its latest Fine Autographs and Artifacts sale.

The document, dated 1868, is a financial receipt issued from St. Thomas’s Abbey in Brno (now in the Czech Republic) where Mendel lived and conducted his pioneering experiments in plant hybridization. In the manuscript receipt, Mendel acknowledges the payment of 63 florins in interest from an endowment capital secured by the Pernstein manor and its associated rights. The document bears Mendel’s signature along with an official red wax seal and revenue stamps.

“Material signed by Gregor Mendel is genuinely scarce," said aid Bobby Livingston, executive vice president at RR Auction. "After his death a succeeding abbot burned many of the papers in his collection, leaving relatively little behind. A document from 1868, the year he became abbot of St. Thomas’s Abbey, places him at the moment when administrative responsibilities began to pull him away from the research that transformed our understanding of heredity.”

Other highlights included:

• a Ford’s Theatre unissued 'Orchestra' ticket dated April 14, 1865, the night President Abraham Lincoln attended the performance of Our American Cousin (sold for $83,414)
• a Warren Buffett signed Berkshire Hathaway 2005 annual report ($20,548)
• King Edward VI signature ($18,126)
• John Adams autograph letter signed as president to historian George R. Minot ($14,949)
• Abraham Lincoln signed free frank as president, addressed and signed by Mary Todd Lincoln ($13,598)
• Albert Einstein autograph letter signed on Piccard’s experiments in the “electrical neutrality of matter” ($12,654)
• Barack Obama signed Time magazine ($10,478)