I’m going through the archives (piles of stuff) retrieved before we sold the family home. I found a thank you note Phyllis Diller wrote to me dad, thanking him for a positive newspaper review. For a while he was entertainment editor for a paper in a medium-sized town.
She drew a little caricature of herself. I wouldn’t sell that because it’s addressed to my dad. I can’t imagine I would get more than twenty or thirty dollar for it anyway.
Until a moment ago I thought I had a signed copy of The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which I planned to sell. But Wikipedia says he died before publication, and “Grant’s printed signature followed the dedication: ‘These volumes are dedicated to the American Soldier and Sailor. / U. S. Grant / New York City / May 23rd, 1885’”
Much more interesting and valuable (to me, not on the market) are my mother’s collection of letters. There is a whole string of rejection letters from her post-college job hunt in the mid 1950s, most of them saying something like “We don’t hire women for this job” or “a woman wouldn’t be effective in this position.”