Manhattan Project Book sold for $27,600
Published June 16th, 2006
A book that cost less than $25 at an estate sale has been auctioned off for $27,600.
Sotheby’s auction house in New York originally had estimated the book would draw up to $12,000, but it sold Thursday for more than twice that amount.
The book, “Atomic Energy for Military Purposes,” was among a stack of dusty books bought in Los Alamos two years ago by Ed Grothus, a Los Alamos National Laboratory machinist turned peace activist.
The first edition copy of the U.S. government’s first account of its top-secret World War II project to develop an atomic bomb popularly is known as “The Smyth Report” for its author Hendry DeWolf Smyth.
“As soon as we saw it, we knew we had something,” Grothus told the Albuquerque Journal in a copyright story published in Thursday’s editions.
The copy bears the signatures of 47 Manhattan Project scientists, including Richard Feynman, Otto Robert Frisch, Edward Teller and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lab’s first director.
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