In fourth-century-bc Asia Minor, purple pigment extracted from the shells of the murex snail cost its weight in silver. Its value rose over the next six hundred years; the Roman emperor Diocletian capped its price per pound at 150,000 denarii, or three pounds of gold.
While synthetic dyes can approximate the color, genuine Tyrian purple pigment remains expensive: up to $4,000 a gram.
According to Pliny the Elder, few elite men in the first-century-bc Mediterranean could resist dining tables made from Mauretanian thuya, or citrus wood. Cicero bought one for 500,000 sesterces (about 500 times the annual pay of a legionary)—a steal compared to the table King Juba of Numidia and Mauretania sold for 1.2 million sesterces.
Large tables like the ones Romans preferred are now rare, but thuya-wood coffee tables can be bought in Morocco for a few hundred dollars.
In 1637, near the end of Dutch “tulipomania,” a single bulb of the Semper Augustus cultivar—prized for its striated “broken” pattern, caused by a finicky virus—was valued at 13,000 florins, about the price of a nice house.
The Semper Augustus is extinct, but heirloom bulbs of the similarly striated Zomerschoon cost about $18 each.
Sourced from Borneo by the Dutch East India Company and believed to cure a host of ailments, stony concretions from porcupine stomachs sold for up to forty times their weight in gold, making them costlier than diamonds in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Though illegal to buy or sell, they remain prized in Malaysian folk medicine and are sold on the black market for the equivalent of more than $300 a gram.
Before the French settlement of Canada in the early seventeenth century, dwindling European beaver populations sent the price of beaver-fur hats, a winter staple, skyrocketing to around £3 to £5, roughly $450 to $1,000 today. On his accession in 1603, James I ordered twenty.
Though demand is much lower, the 2018 price remains high: a hat made of 100 percent beaver fur runs about $500.
The animal-shaped beanbag toys sold new for $5 each in the mid-1990s, but limited production drove up demand on the secondary market. A purple bear commemorating the death of Princess Diana sold out almost immediately in 1997; resale prices hovered between $200 and $300 for a year, and many collectors stockpiled in hopes of a future payday.
The average price of a Beanie Baby is less than $1, but “Princess Di” bears hold more value, at about $5.
