The Jane Austen £10 note has been circulating for only four months, but already its most collectible iterations are fetching inflated prices on eBay. Back in October, readers will recall, the Bank of England raised money for charity by auctioning off Austen tenners with some of the most desirable serial numbers. Now a slew of Austen notes with allegedly covetable characteristics – notes from early in the print run, notes with tiny printing errors, notes with serial numbers beginning with or ending with or incorporating the years of Austen’s birth (1775) and death (1817) – are available from sellers with presumably less altruistic motives.
My own personal Austen £10 note. Worth £10.
A few days ago, the UK’s Express newspaper reported that a seller on the British version of eBay had persuaded someone to pay £3,600 (nearly $5,000) for an Austen note with a serial number beginning with 1775. Don’t ask me how the super-valuable note differed appreciably from the Austen tenner with a 1775 serial number currently available on the site for £250 – and that one is a package deal with a note bearing an 1817 serial number. The psychology of collectors is a mystery to me, but hey -- everything is worth what somebody will pay for it, right? Not to worry if £3,600 is too much for you: Right now, Austen tenners seem to be available on UK eBay at almost every price point. You can pay a semi-staggering £490 premium for a note from the first print run, or a modest £1 markup for. . . a note from the first print run. (Go figure. I can’t tell the difference.) Or you can change a £20 note at your local pub and get two probably-perfectly-respectable Austen tenners for no premium at all. Up to you.
Comments