After the Declaration was finished and signed in 1776, a printer named John Dunlap was asked to make 200 copies (some say 500) of the Declaration to be distributed throughout the 13 British colonies in America.
Declaring independence would not be welcome news to the British, so Dunlap hastily prepared and printed the broadside for distribution.
During the next 200 years, many copies, no doubt, were used for colonial bird cages. Some of the original colonial families held onto their copy of the broadside and passed it down to their heirs. But most are lost to time. Only 26 copies of the Dunlap Broadsides are known to survive today.
The most famous recent find of the broadside occurred in 1989 when a financial analyst, browsing a Pennsylvania flea market, came upon an crude, and dreary, painting of a country scene in an ornate frame. Thinking the frame might be worth something, the man tore away the painting, only to find that the frame, was poorly made. But behind the painting he saw a paper folded into the size of a business envelope. The ancient printing on the paper was a curiosity, according to the New York Times.
A friend thought the paper might be more than a curiosity.
Selby Kiffer, a printing specialist at Sotheby's, told the New York times in 1991 that it turned out this was a first-printing copy of the declaration that was, astoundingly, in perfect condition he described as "beyond reproach."
One other thing: the Broadside was still wet when it was folded. The first line of the Declaration shows up in reverse at the bottom margin — evidence that Dunlap wasted no time distributing the Broadsides.
By the way, the collector who spent $4 on the painting in 1989 sold the document for more than $2.4 million. A consortium later bought the document for $8.14 million.
