A Commodity Becomes a Relic
JIM IRSAY COLLECTION SUPPLEMENT
A STUDY IN CONTRASTS
In the most dramatic moments of the sale— the Black Strat and Tiger in particular— the
bidding came down to two determined collectors and one irreplaceable object. At that point
price stops being a measure of value and becomes a measure of will. These were personal
quests, the kind in which an object becomes a grail, and when two such collectors collide, the
numbers that result can distort the ground around them, saying more about the intensity of the
pursuit than about the market those numbers appear to describe.
A Commodity Becomes a Relic
David Gilmour’ s Black Strat sold at Christie’ s for $ 14.55 million— a record for any guitar at auction. The number is astonishing. The story behind it is more so.
David Gilmour bought it in 1970 at Manny’ s Music in New York for about $ 275. Serial number 266936, placing it squarely in the 1969 – 70 Fender production window— the CBS era, which is to say the era that most serious collectors tend to skip over. CBS acquired Fender in 1965, and what followed was the guitar world’ s version of the Norlin years at Gibson: cost-cutting, quality drift, and a general decline in the things that made the earlier instruments special. Pre-CBS Strats from the late’ 50s and early’ 60s are what command serious money among vintage purists. A 1969 Stratocaster, by that logic, should be an afterthought.
And yet. The guitar Gilmour pulled off the rack at Manny’ s— alder body, maple neck, rosewood fingerboard, three single-coil pickups, standard tremolo, mass-produced factory electronics— would go on to record Comfortably Numb. It would play Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Money, Time, Us and Them. It became the primary electric instrument across six Pink Floyd albums: Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall, and
124 | SPRING 2026