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davidcyclebackAnyone who buys and resells on eBay (for example), knows that there is wide variation in how the same thing sells two weeks apart. For this reason alone, I doubt price guides that quote a single price for anything.
Auctions involve so much chicanery (shilling, book bidding, idiot bidders bidding against each other, sale fell through as buyer didn't pay, item misdescribed, time of day, etc), I don't consider auction prices to be entirely reliable indicator of financial value. In many of these high price auctions, you don't know if the buyer paid and there was even a sale.
The hobby likes to focus on record setting prices, but these are far more often than not unreliable prices for the average collector or seller. By definition and nature, a record is abnormal, even freakish-- and its difficult determining the normal by focusing on the abnormal. To determine the normal, you usually start by throwing out the freakish (high and/or low), or you look at the abnornal and say "That ain't it."