IF you’re doing your year-end clean-up, you might just want to think twice before throwing away things that have piled up over the past 12 months — junk mail, assorted store receipts and used concert tickets, old magazines and shopping bags. These are precisely the materials you may need to bring out the artist in you once and for all. Or, if you’re the tinkering type who already enjoys cutting paper and pictures and putting them all together for some art project, these make up yet another chance to do more of the same!

NEW YORK (AP) — The oldest known copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s“The Scarlet Letter” was auctioned for $545,100, a record price for an American 19th-century literary work, Christie’s auction house said.