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papers, Armin's papers, and the Jane Allen papers were excluded
from evidence. The remaining portion of the Austin report was
received into evidence as Austin’s expert testimony. Austin is
of the opinion that, on the contribution date, the coin ledgers
and the Chicago Coin Co. papers had fair market values of
$450,000 and $20,000, respectively.
To value the coin ledgers and the Chicago Coin Co. papers,
Austin looked for sales of comparable items to use in estimating
both items' fair market value. Austin found two sales at auction
of items that he asserts were only “quasi-comparables”. Austin
prefers not to rely on auction sales to value archival material
because he believes auction prices are not necessarily good
indicators of value. He prefers to rely instead on private
sales, but, since records of such sales were not available to
him, and due to the uniqueness of the Brand Archives, he could
not do so.
Austin finds that the most useful public record in arriving
at a value of the Brand Archive is the price paid by petitioners
for Horace’s half of the coin ledgers and accompanying half of
the photocopy. Petitioners purchased those items at public
auction in 1983 for $22,550. Austin believes that the amount
that would have been realized at that auction had the lot
contained the full set of coin ledgers would have been "triple".
He also believes that $22,550 was an insufficient representation
of a fair market value for half of the coin ledgers because of
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