RR Auction

RR Auction is an auction house headquartered in Boston's North End with a production office based in Amherst, New Hampshire. First established in 1976 and officially founded in 1980 by CEO Bob Eaton, the company is known for its monthly auctions of rare documents, manuscripts, autographs, and historic artifacts, often exceeding 1,000 lots per sale. The auction house has developed global recognition with a worldwide client base and publishes monthly catalogs in print and online via issuu.
History.
In 1976, RR Auction CEO and founder Bob Eaton, then 19 years old and recently graduated from Newton North High School, purchased $1800 worth of sports memorabilia. The memorabilia included a Babe Ruth baseball and Red Sox World Series programs, and he proceeded to sell them for ten times his original purchase price. After this, Eaton established RR Auction and began to sell sports cards and signed memorabilia out of his basement, until he decided in 1980 to send out a mailing list of the items he had available for sale --- thus founding the company in Newton Centre, Massachusetts.
In 1995, RR Auction switched from retail sales to auctioning and Eaton decided to bring the business to Amherst, New Hampshire, where the company has an office to this day. The first internet auction occurred the same year. At this time the company also began including items other than autographs.
RR Auction launched the option for online bidding in 2004. This has contributed to the growth of the company over the years. In 2009, RR Auction brought in $8 million in annual revenue. This increased by 2014, and this same year the company opened an auction gallery in a new 1,500 square-foot facility in Boston's North End community after expanding considerably after the launch of their website.
Today.
The auction house now focuses on artifacts from American history and pop culture, and these are often the themes of their online and live auctions, though autographs are still the most commonly featured item. Their auction website remains active while they still send out monthly catalogues. The mid-sized auction house registers up to $10 million in sales every year and mails out over 1,000 monthly catalogues while their online auction system draws around 6,000 visitors per week.
In 2015, an unsuccessful attempt to bring a California class-action lawsuit against RR Auction was thrown out after no other individual was found to join the class;[8] the company characterized the suit as "extortion by litigation".[9]. The California lawsuit was dismissed in 2017. In a countersuit filed in Federal Court in New Hampshire citing the ACPA, RR Auction sought to protect its reputation and trademark against online attacks by the complainant;[10] this became the basis of an article about "malicious cyber-gripers" in the New Jersey Law Journal.[11] 