For sale, Steve Jobs’s first Apple

press release, just in:

New York – On December 11, Christie’s is honored to offer an American cultural icon, ‘The Ricketts’ Apple-1 Personal Computer, as part of the auction house’s inaugural Exceptional Salein New York, taking place December 11 at Rockefeller Center. Named after its first owner Charles Ricketts, this example is the only known surviving Apple-1 documented to have been sold directly by Steve Jobs to an individual from his parents’ garage. It is estimated at $400,000 – 600,000, the highest estimate yet for an original Apple-1 offered at auction.

23 years after Ricketts bought the Apple-1 from Jobs in Los Altos, it was acquired by Bruce Waldack, a freshly minted entrepreneur who’d just sold his company DigitalNation. The Ricketts Apple-1 was auctioned at a sheriff’s sale of Waldack’s property at a self-storage facility in Virginia in 2004, and won by the present consigner, the American collector, Bob Luther.