Auctions can bring hefty prices for unique, rare items. Recently, a manual typewriter fetched the amount of $254,000.
Why the astronomical price? You may wonder about this because living in the digital age, who needs a typewriter?
Possibly similar to the sale of one of Michael Jackson’s glove, this memorabilia belonged to Cormac McCarthy, American fiction writer. From this humble looking typewriter, McCarthy typed more than 5 million words over a period of 50 years.
Cormac McCarthy, born in 1933, is an American novelist and playwright sometimes compared to Faulkner. Six of his novels were made into films. Well known for his 2007, Pulitzer prize winning, work of fiction called, “The Road.”
In 2008, McCarthy was awarded the Pen/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. His work was recognized for qualities of excellence, ambition and scale of achievement during his writing career. This places him in the highest ranks of American literature.
People predicted his typewriter may go for $18K or so. Those predictions were far below the price it received. The large sum of money was donated to a scientific research organization, the Santa Fe Institute.
The qualities of uniqueness combined with scarcity can drive up the value of an item exponentially. With many competing businesses in similar niches popping up all over the web, thousands will collapse and a few will prosper. It seems to be a natural cycle of business.
If you want your Internet business to prosper, ask yourself if you have something to offer people that is both unique and scarce. The more you can meet this criteria, the better your business will do. What can you bring to the table that is different from every other company? Opportunities to create new, unique products are endless.
The entrepreneur in us sees opportunities everywhere we look, but many people see only problems everywhere they look. The entrepreneur in us is more concerned with discriminating between opportunities than he or she is with failing to see the opportunities. ~Michael Gerber
