Sotheby’s puts rare U.S. Constitution copy for auction

NEW YORK » A very special birth certificate will be auctioned off later this year — a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution.

Sotheby’s announced Friday — appropriately on Constitution Day — that in November it will put up for auction one of just 11 surviving copies of the Constitution from the official first printing produced for the delegates to the Constitutional Convention and for the Continental Congress. It’s the only copy that remains in private hands and has an estimate of $15 million-$20 million.

“This is the final text,” Selby Kiffer, an international senior specialist in Sotheby’s Books and Manuscripts Department, told The Associated Press. “The debate on what the Constitution would say was over with this document. The debate about whether the Constitution was going to be adopted was just beginning. This was the Constitution, but it didn’t take effect until it had been debated and ratified. So this was the first step in the process of us living now under this 234-year-old document.”