Dirk asked:
> I know it's out of the official timeline but maybe as a true
> classic still on topic.
> The owner of a LBS showed me yesterday his hidden treasure, a new
> unridden pearl white De Rosa 35 Anniversario with the famous blue
> anodized Record Century group.
> http://photos.yahoo.com/
> He asked me what the current value of such a bike would be for
> collectors. I guessed (wildly) that the value might be the price
> when new in 1991 (~2500 EUR today). Does anybody has a better
> guess? Has such a bike (or another one with Century parts) been
> sold recently at eBay or Yahoo?
> I know the Century parts are much rarer than the 50th Anniversary
> group, but is there a corresponding demand? I'd prefer the looks
> of the common silver parts BTW.
> This is not a sales offer (where I want to weasel out of giving a
> price), the bike is not mine, I won't buy it myself and I even
> don't know if the owner wants to sell it at all outside of
> Germany. I think he just wants to be prepared for offers of local
> customers.
Ben Kamen has just such a frame. I wonder where he picked it up?
In the US, this bike was seemingly never sold with the blued C-Record gruppo, even if this is how De Rosa advertised the bike in their brochures that year. A friend of mine was the largest De Rosa dealer in Germany at the time (Pietro Wetzel in Frankfurt) and he too had a few of these pass through his shop with the blued parts. All the ones that I saw had pantographed delta brakes however.
With regards to value, there was a 35° anniversario bike with regular C- Record that went for $1750 last fall here in the US on ebay. It was in very good shape and so the sole difference would be the blued components. I agree that your guess of about 2500 euros would be appropriate. By the way, I firmly believe that this bike has the nicest graphics of any bike that I have seen in a long time with the discrete rose on the front and the ugo de rosa signature on the down tube. By the way, there were 500 of these bikes sold world-wide.
Steven Maasland
Moorestown, NJ