Baseball players Napoleon Lajoie and Honus Wagner in 1904 (via Boston Public Library). A baseball card featuring Wagner sold for $1.3m at auction.
Inspired by the Harper’s Index, Sum of the Arts is a periodic tabulation of numbers floating around the art world and beyond.
- Number of prospective buyers who helped drive up the price of the most valuable baseball card — a 1910s depiction of Honus Wagner of the Pittsburgh Pirates — to $1.3 million at auction last weekend = 42
- Gold-plated trumpets that will join hundreds of artifacts in a new Louis Armstrong House Museum Education Center set to open in 2017 = 5
- Number of oil sketches by Canadian Group of Seven member J.E.H MacDonald buried in the Toronto artist’s backyard, later exhumed by his son and donated to the Vancouver Art Gallery = 10
- Carnegie library branches, which were built with funds donated by Andrew Carnegie in the early 20th century, still operating in Brooklyn = 18
- Hours composer Karlheinz Stockhausen intended for his unfinished cycle Klang, which will be performed in the spring of 2016 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s three locations, including the Whitney’s old Breuer building = 24
- Years Kazuo Nomura took before drawing a mind-bending sequel to what’s considered the most challenging maze in the world = 32
- Percentage of the Cortlandt Street NYC subway station walls that will be covered with text fragments by artist Ann Hamilton = 70
- Miles (roughly) between composer Frédéric Chopin’s interred body and his heart kept in a crystal urn = 985
- Feet the tallest structure in the Western hemisphere, the KVLY-TV Tower, stands in the North Dakota countryside = 2,063
- Weight (in pounds) of each of the five granite arches that are part of a memorial sculpture dedicated to the MIT police officer killed by the Boston Marathon bombers = 20,000–50,000
