Leila Dunbar

Sports Memorabilia

Updated: 7.17.09

After serving nine years as Sotheby's senior vice president and director of the Collectibles department (1999-2008), Leila Dunbar founded Leila Dunbar LLC, a firm that offers consulting and appraisal services to private clients, auction houses, corporations, media, and institutions.

Areas include collection management projects such as acquisitions, liquidation, curatorial and archival consultation; auction house consultation, referrals and cataloguing; appraisals including but not limited to estate tax, insurance, and donation; lectures, presentations, and workshops; radio and television appraisal and color commentary work; article writing, auctioneering, and occasional commerce and brokerage.

Recent institutional clients include the Baseball Hall of Fame, Country Music Hall of Fame, the Ronald Reagan Museum and Library, and Sotheby's.

In her nine years at Sotheby's, Lee's department sold more than $75 million worth of memorabilia via live and online auctions of collectibles, largely in the areas of entertainment (Hollywood and Rock-n-Roll) memorabilia, sports memorabilia, toys, animation art, comic art, and movie posters.

High-profile entertainment highlights include: The estate of Katharine Hepburn; the estate of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash; and property from the collection of Cher.

In sports memorabilia, highlights include the bat that Babe Ruth used to hit the first home run ever on Grand Opening Day at Yankee Stadium, for $1.25 million, a record for a bat; and the 1919 contract selling Ruth from the Red Sox to the Yankees, for $996,000, a record for a sports contract. Estates sold also include Pee Wee Reese, Casey Stengel, Lefty Grove, Arthur Ashe, Ernie Lombardi, and Jim Murray.

From 1999-2003, Sotheby's Collectibles sold more than $18 million through online sales on Sothebys.com, including collections of memorabilia from the Boston Garden, Wilt Chamberlain, the Lone Ranger, Marilyn Monroe, "Seinfeld," the Beatles, Madonna, Cher, Billy Martin, Muhammad Ali, Secretariat, and the Barry Halper Baseball Collection Part II, as well as the Shagmobile from "Austin Powers."