Leslie Hindman Auctioneers announces a once in a lifetime opportunity for Elvis Presley collectors and fans.

Over the years many collectors have asked, “Whatever happened to the Gary Pepper collection of Elvis Presley memorabilia?” Early in his career, Presley befriended Gary Pepper, a young man with cerebral palsy, who ultimately became a close friend and the president of one of the King's first fan clubs, allowing him to amass a significant collection of personal effects gifted to him from Presley himself.

When Pepper moved to California, he left the majority of his collection to his friend and nurse, who was originally hired by Elvis to look after Gary. Hopeful that collectors and fans can enjoy the memorabilia so treasured by Gary Pepper, she has recently decided to sell the collection at auction.

Untouched for over three decades, this special collection will be offered for sale at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, Sunday, October 18th, 2009 with a...

A schoolboy Paul is seen engrossed in a comic surrounded by classmates from Joseph Williams School, Liverpool, in the picture, taken in 1952.

A woman recently took it into The Beatles Shop - a few metres away from the original Cavern Club in Liverpool.

It will be among 315 items of Beatles memorabilia auctioned on 29 August.

'Truly amazing'

The haul also features a class photograph of drummer Ringo Starr, aged eight, sitting smartly dressed in shorts and a black jacket at St Silus School.

"It's the earliest class photo [of Ringo] we have," said Stephen Bailey, manager of The Beatles Shop, which is organising the auction.

Also on sale is a lithograph of producer Sir George Martin's score for the Beatles song Yesterday...

[Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times.]

IN our 24/7 mediasphere, this weekend’s misty Woodstock commemorations must share the screen with Americans screaming bloody murder at town hall meetings. It’s a vivid reminder that what most endures from America, 1969, is not the peace-and-love flower-power bacchanal of Woodstock legend but a certain style of political rage. The angry white folk shouting down their congressmen might be — literally in some cases — those angry white students whose protests disrupted campuses before and after the Woodstock interlude of summer vacation ’69.

The most historically resonant television event this weekend, however, may be none of the above. Sunday night is the premiere of the third season of “Mad Men,” the AMC series about a fictional Madison Avenue ad agency in the early 1960s. The first episode is to be simulcast in Times Square after a costume party where fans can parade their retro wardrobes. This...

The Christie’s London bi-annual sale of Old Master, Modern and Contemporary Prints in September will feature a fantastic variety of original prints from the Renaissance to the present day including well-known artists such as Dürer, Rembrandt, Picasso, Beckmann, Matisse, Miro, Bacon, Warhol, Lichtenstein and Hockney.

A leading highlight from the sale is Les Deux Femmes Nues, an important and rare series of 22 lithographs from 1945 by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), including five previously unrecorded intermediate variants of the print (estimate: £100,000-150,000). This incredible collection, portraying the image of two women ‘morphing’ with each impression, brilliantly displays Picasso’s relentless creative drive, as well as his talent as a remarkably skillful printmaker. Over half a century on, commentators and cataloguers are still adding to the literature on this period of intense artistic activity, almost unparalleled in the history of western art. Through this fascinating...

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian inaugurates a season-long celebration of four landmark anniversaries through special exhibitions, events and family programming from September through November 2009. This fall marks the 20th anniversary of the signing of the legislation that created the museum, the 15th anniversary of the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, the 10th anniversary of the state-of-the-art collections facility in Suitland, Md., and the fifth anniversary of the opening of the flagship museum on the National Mall.

The museum complex stands as a symbol of Native history, vitality and contemporary relevance and has become a showcase for the beauty and genius of Native peoples. “We have so much to celebrate,” said Kevin Gover (Pawnee/Comanche), director of the museum. “Since its creation, the National Museum of the American Indian has mounted scores of exhibitions and hosted more than a thousand Native American artists, dancers,...

It must be a tough job running the Edinburgh International Festival. Quite apart from arranging all those performances of Wagner and Purcell, there is the stress of handling the multi-million-pound budget and the pressure of hundreds of thousands of expectant visitors. And on top of all that is the gnawing frustration, the sheer injustice, of knowing that even while you are putting the finishing touches to your radical reinterpretation of Handel's Judas Maccabaeus, most people think the real Festival is happening in the upstairs room of some grimy pub, where a man in drag is telling dirty jokes to three drunken students and his embarrassed mother.

So perhaps we should not be too hard on Jonathan Mills, the Australian director of the Festival's "official" component, who this week delivered a ferocious rant about the "trivialisation" of British cultural life, with its diet of "pre-digested baby food" and "white bread without the crusts...

Somewhere a soldier, or journalist, or bodyguard, or civilian contractor is writing the ultimate account of an Iraq War in which rock ’n’ rollers with one foot in the grave come of age while killing and being killed. It may be a memoir, it may be a novel. It is likelier a screenplay, since movies are where so much of literature can be found these days.

Whatever its format, that writer has a powerful model in the Anthony Swofford’s death-haunted, heavy metal–tinged Jarhead, which, with the film Three Kings, does the job for our first Mesopotamian war. He—or she—has an even greater model in Robert Stone’s novel Dog Soldiers, a very nearly perfect book. That writer will find Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, and Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers hard to beat.

None of those books, however, carries quite as much weight page for page, to say nothing of psychedelic weirdness, as Michael Herr’s Dispatches,...

Detectives fear that almost 300 rare and "irreplaceable" tropical birds stolen from the Natural History Museum's ornithological collection could be ripped to shreds for use as fishing lures, dress adornments and costume jewellery.

Curators at the museum's bird collection in Tring, Hertfordshire, noticed that dozens of specimens had gone missing following a break-in on 24 June.

Although the thieves left behind more than 8,000 "specimen types", including the finches collected by Charles Darwin in the Galápagos, they took 299 birds.

The gang, which could have stolen the birds to order, removed quetzal and cotinga birds, animals that had originated in Central and South America, and birds of paradise from Papua New Guinea.

Police believe those responsible had detailed knowledge of the birds since the cabinets were labelled with Latin names organised in evolutionary order and only a small number of birds were disturbed...

Many of the most crucial events of the 1960s—including the civil rights victories, antiwar protests, and the sweeping cultural revolution—left few physical traces. All but a handful of the decade's famous counterculture hangouts shuttered their doors long ago, and you won't find any monuments where major student uprisings took place. Sure, you can drive up to Woodstock to see where you once reveled in the mud, but there will be no public intoxication, tents, fires, or camping.

As the organizers of Woodstock 1994 and 1999 probably learned, that history can't be recreated. "What's celebrated about the Sixties are a couple of things," says Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple University. "It was a moment when youth ruled, and, secondly, there was a certain kind of freedom of expression, of dance, of bodies. Getting high was sort of a third thing—there's a sort of sweetness to those memories. And it was a moment where it seemed that idealism ruled, a...