One of a Kind

By NANCY GIBBS

The department-store answer to What to give the person who has everything? typically comes down to dollars: Saks Fifth Avenue offers a $215,000 bottle of perfume; British retailer Fortnum & Mason has a $41,000 Christmas basket--including caviar, champagne and foie gras--that is delivered by horse and carriage; and Neiman Marcus, ever determined to be the most ridiculous, is touting a $1.4 million Triton 1000 submarine with leather seats.

But anyone with a taste for history--or taste at all--might do better trolling the auction houses this month, where once-in-a-lifetime shopping opportunities abound. In the first liquor auction since Prohibition at Christie's in Manhattan, a 1926 single-malt Macallan scotch went for $54,000; that's more than $2,000 per oz. (30 mL). Elsewhere, a lock of John Lennon's hair brought $48,000, but Marie Antoinette's pearls and Orson Welles' Oscar are still available, both having failed to reach their minimum bids.

The greatest buying opportunity comes on Dec. 18, when Sotheby's auctions off what it calls "the birth certificate of freedom": the Magna Carta (above), one of 17 originals that still exist and the only one in private hands. Signed by England's King John at Runnymede in 1215 to appease his rebellious barons, the charter was revised over the years until the 1297 version became the foundation of English liberties. When Texas billionaire Ross Perot managed to buy one privately in 1984 for $1.5 million, he lent it to the National Archives so it could lie beside its democratic descendants, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, in testimony to the power of pen over sword. But amid a revived debate over the meaning of due process in the age of terrorism, the Perot Foundation decided it wanted more money to spend on its signature causes, particularly the care of wounded soldiers, and put the document up for sale.

If the U.S. is to have any chance of retaining its copy, it will need an angel to bid in an auction that is expected to bring between $20 million and $30 million--and then turn around, shake hands with history and give the American people the gift of a lifetime.