Current Events & Trends | October 2011 | Rebecca Rego Barry

An English Bibliophile

On Thursday of this week Sotheby's NY will hold the second part of its incredible sale of the library of an English Bibliophile. Judging from the list, this English bibliophile was quite the collector of the high points of American literature. Several of the lots estimated in the six-figure range* are American first editions, including:

A first edition of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in its second state (still ultra rare) dust jacket (est. $150,000-$180,000).

A first edition/first issue of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales (est. $200,000-$250,000).

Poe's The Raven and Other Poems, in its original wrappers (est. $140,000-$180,000).

A first edition/first issue of Whitman's Leaves of Grass (est. $140,000-$160,000).
Other major "American" lots (high five figures): a first edition in original boards of Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (est. $30,000-$40,000); a first edition of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land ($35,000-$50,000); a first edition of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury ($50,000-$70,000); Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise ($50,000-$60,000); an inscribed first edition of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon ($50,000-$70,000); Nathaniel Hawthorne's Fanshawe in its original binding and owned by James T. Fields ($40,000-$60,000); a first edition of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises ($70,000-$90,000); and a first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ($20,000-$30,000)

*Also garnering a six-figure estimate: an inscribed first of Joyce's Ulysses ($450,000-$500,000), a Shakespeare first folio ($600,000-$700,000), and a third folio ($350,000-$400,000). What a collection. But can the market bear these big tickets? We shall see.

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