This Day in History

JFK sets record for album sales

On this day in 1963, a vinyl long-playing record called John Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Memorial Album sets a record for album sales with 4 million copies sold in the first six days of its release.
Gathering recordings of some of Kennedy’s most memorable speeches, as well as memorial tributes to the president broadcast in the aftermath of his assassination on November 22, 1963 the album was released on the Premier Label. It included excerpts from his inaugural address and his campaign debates with Richard Nixon as well as highlights from speeches on a variety of topics from civil rights to space to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” (from his inaugural speech) and “Ich bin ein Berliner” stated at the Berlin Wall during the height of the Cold War were some of Kennedy’s most enduring quotes included in the LP.
Each copy of the album cost 99 cents and the proceeds went to the Joseph Kennedy, Jr., Foundation for Mental Retardation. Although Kennedy remains one of the most beloved and documented presidents in American history, the album itself has not yet garnered much value as a collector’s item. In 2006, a mint copy of the album fetched only 15 dollars on internet auction sites.

Da Vinci notebook: 5 million

In 1980, also on this day, a notebook containing writings by the Leonardo da Vinci fetches US 5,126,000 dollars at an auction.
The price tag was the highest ever paid for a manuscript at that time; a copy of the legendary Gutenberg Bible had gone for only USD 2 million in 1978.
The manuscript – later known as the Leicester Codex – written around 1508, was one of some 30 similar books da Vinci produced during his lifetime on a variety of subjects. It contained 72 loose pages featuring some 300 notes and detailed drawings, all relating to the common theme of water and how it moved. Experts have said that da Vinci drew on it to paint the background of his masterwork, the Mona Lisa. The text, written in brown ink and chalk, read from right to left, an example of da Vinci’s favored mirror-writing technique. The painter Giuseppi Ghezzi discovered the notebook in 1690 in a chest of papers belonging to Guglielmo della Porto, a 16th-century Milanese sculptor who had studied Leonardo’s work.
On November 11, 1994, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft bought the Codex at another auction for a new record high price of USD 30.8 million and has since loaned the manuscript to a number of museums for public display.