Dave Mustaine's Signed Memoir Available Now

In My Darkest Hour is Mustaine’s second memoir, covering his 2019 throat cancer diagnosis and the recording of Megadeth’s sixteenth studio album, The Sick, The Dying…and the Dead! His first memoir was a New York Times bestseller. Premiere Collectibles is offering three tiers at $50, $55, and $60, respectively.

The black ink standard edition is capped at 2,499 copies. A red ink variant is limited to 1,499. The most limited is a green ink collector’s edition at just 999 copies. Total signed inventory across all three tiers comes to 4,997 units.

Megadeth and Dave Mustaine are icons of heavy metal. The band has been a mainstay among thrashers for more than forty years, and there are plenty of fans willing to buy a piece of the story. Earlier this year, we tracked signed vinyl editions of the band’s final album reselling for more than triple the retail price.

Signed celebrity memoirs follow a similar pattern: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful flipped for around $150, and Barbra Streisand’s signed memoir commanded comparable premiums.

That said, Dave will be signing 4,997 of these books. That’s a lot of supply compared to most limited collectible drops, and it’s worth asking the question of how much the green ink limited editions will meaningfully affect value.

There’s also an autopenning question worth raising. Mustaine has sustained a series of wrist injuries in his career. Will he be able to sign almost 5,000 copies of the book, or will he take the easy road? Autopenned signatures can seriously affect the value of a celebrity’s signed books.

Still, this seems pretty low risk. Preorders can be canceled for a full refund any time before a shipping label is created, per Premiere Collectibles’ policy. Since these ship in September, you have a long runway to monitor the secondary market and back out if things don’t develop. That makes the risk here manageable.