In a Sotheby’s New York (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) sale of December 12, however, a rare exception, an inscribed 1985 first of his autobiography sold for $35,000 (£26,315).
It is also signed by his close friend and drumming partner, Ralph Leighton, to whom these ‘Adventures of a Curious Character’ are related.
Part of the jacket blurb reads: “…Feynman is perhaps the only person in the history of the world to solve the mystery of liquid helium and to be commissioned to paint a naked (female) toreador; to crack many of the most ‘secure’ safes at Los Alamos during development of the atomic bomb and to play a skillful frigideira [frying pan] in a Brazilian samba band… and to accompany ballet on the bongo drums.”
Feynman is also the only person to have been “…judged mentally deficient by a United States Army psychiatrist and worthy of the Nobel Prize by the Swedish Academy…”
