100 seventy-five cookie jars that belonged to Andy Warhol. The bat that Babe Ruth carried in his terminating look at Yankee Stadium. A piano plinked through Dooley Wilson, as Sam, in “Casablanca.” The Duchess of Windsor’s jewellery.
David N. Redden, an leading edge auctioneer and a dapper presence on the podium, bought all of them in a 42-year profession at Sotheby’s. He additionally bought the Magna Carta, James Naismith’s untouched laws of basketball, a 1776 brochure of the Declaration of Self rule discovered at the back of a $4 flea-market portray, and the arena’s most costly keep, stamp and coin.
Mr. Redden, who specialised in uncommon manuscripts, collectibles, memorabilia and famous person bric-a-brac — and likewise in producing pleasure round such items, turning auctions into prime leisure — died on Would possibly 11 at his house in Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was once 75.
His spouse, Jeannette Redden, mentioned the reason was once headaches of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., which he had for 9 years.
As a vp of Sotheby’s, and as its longest-serving auctioneer, Mr. Redden had a marginally of P.T. Barnum in his aptitude for dreaming up book pieces to promote and romanticizing them with a tale that attracted exposure, bidders and easily looky-loos to Sotheby’s galleries at the Higher East Facet of Ny. He arranged a lot of Sotheby’s most renowned gross sales.
“David Redden had a vision for presenting things to make them larger than life,” Benjamin Doller, the chairman of Sotheby’s for the Americas, mentioned in an interview. “He was a great auction impresario.”
Because the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Mr. Redden traveled to Big name Town, Russia, and positive the government to permit a going-out-of-business sale of field artifacts. Again in Brandnew York, he auctioned a tablet, a spacesuit, moon rocks and, audaciously, a analysis rover left at the back of at the moon. (It bought for $68,500 to an nameless purchaser who sought after the bragging rights of possession.)
“The urge to collect is not based on the age of objects,” Mr. Redden instructed The Brandnew York Occasions in 1995. “As a small child, I was a passionate collector of rocks, leaves, bark and insects. Sometimes what’s new is what people want.”
Most likely essentially the most well-known tournament of his profession, which he helped to arrange and to gavel indisposed, was once the four-day sale in 1996 of the property of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Some 30,000 public considered the pre-sale shows of furnishings, jewellery and White Space knickknacks and snapped up greater than 100,000 catalogs, at $90 in hardcover and $45 in softcover.
Costs, pushed through ecstasies of nostalgia, went throughout the roof. A rocking chair that President John F. Kennedy had old went for $453,000. Arnold Schwarzenegger paid $772,500 for the president’s MacGregor golfing golf equipment. A leather-based table i’m ready bought for $189,500.
“They are not selling things,” the Occasions columnist Clyde Haberman wrote. “They are selling yesterday, when the world was young.”
Mr. Redden introduced items to the public sale cancel that had by no means traded palms in this kind of atmosphere. Within the early Nineteen Nineties, generation at breakfast, he learn a newspaper article a couple of felony dispute over an exquisitely upheld Tyrannosaurus rex named Sue that have been dug up in South Dakota.
“He said to me, ‘It should go to auction,’” Ms. Redden, his spouse, recalled. “I said, ‘Why don’t you just call them up?’” He was once in his pajamas, however he did. He were given the dinosaur guy, and so they bought it for $8 million.”
Mr. Redden was once additionally a pioneer of web auctions for Sotheby’s. On its website online, Sothebys.com, he auctioned the flea marketplace Declaration of Self rule in 2000 for $7.4 million, one of the vital very best costs paid for a record on the web to that time. The patrons had been the tv manufacturer Norman Lear and David Hayden, a tech entrepreneur.
David Normand Redden was once born on Jan. 23, 1949, in Canton, China (now Guangzhou), to Normand and Annabel (Austin) Redden. His father was once an American diplomat, and when the Communists took over China next that 12 months, the community escaped through boat indisposed the Pearl River.
“We were fired on as we left,” David Redden instructed The Occasions in 2000.
As his father moved from nation to nation for the Condition Section, David attended grade faculty in England and secondary faculty in Rome. (He would book an English speech from his training all through his hour.) He earned a B.A. from Wesleyan College in Connecticut, the place he studied artwork historical past.
In 1974 he were given a task as a catalog trainee at Sotheby’s. Six years next he was once operating PB-84, a derivative of the public sale space that bought lower-price artwork and antiques.
“I became an auctioneer very quickly in a way that wouldn’t happen nowadays: I was told to go up to the podium and get going,” he mentioned in 2000. “I was terrified, so terrified I forgot to write down the sale prices of the first 20 lots I sold.”
In 1978 he married Jeannette Andreasen, an environmentalist. Along with their house on Typhoon King Mountain within the Hudson Valley, the couple resided in a duplex within the former Joseph Pulitzer mansion on East 73rd Side road, the place they held dinner events for 14 within the theatrical atmosphere of the rooftop terrace. The rental had as soon as been in demand through Roy Chapman Andrews, an explorer who was once additionally the director of the American Museum of Herbal Historical past.
But even so his spouse, Mr. Redden is survived through a son, Stephen; a daughter, Clare Redden; a brother, Nigel Redden; and a sister, Melanie Redden Whitlock.
In his next years, as A.L.S. restricted his mobility, his keep watch over of his muscle mass and his skill to talk, Mr. Redden sought tactics to conform. He communicated through typing on a pc that tracked his visible actions. He had an experimental implant in his mind and underwent extensive coaching aimed toward enabling him to keep watch over a pc the use of his ideas.
“He was always restless and looking for interesting new adventures,” Ms. Redden mentioned. “You were not bored with him.”
