Columbus Letter Sells at Auction for $3.9m

The Epistola de insulis nuper inventis, the earliest obtainable edition of Christopher Columbus’s letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella announcing his “discovery” of the American continent, has been sold for $3,922,000, 392 percent of its low estimate. 

The printed edition of the letter in Latin was the top lot of Christie’s Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts including Americana sale which totalled $7,313,038, with one in five bidders/buyers  new to the books and manuscripts category at Christie’s, while almost 10 per cent of bidders/buyers were millennials.

“Offering one of the most important documents in history and setting a world auction record of almost $4 million is a career-defining moment for my Christie’s colleagues and me," said Christie’s international head of books and manuscripts, Margaret Ford. "It has been especially gratifying to see our own passion for books matched by collectors, who continue to appreciate such historical documents with all their nuances and complexities. We are also thrilled to see the diversity of collectors who participated in this sale, a sign of the healthy future of the category.”    

This example of the letter was previously in a private Swiss library for nearly a century. Produced in the first half-century of the printing press, and translated into Latin for widespread consumption, the Columbus Letter is a slim document and extremely few copies survive outside of institutional libraries. Not since 1966, in the Thomas W. Streeter sale, has a copy been offered at auction which has provenance dating back over 50 years. Earlier this year, an original edition of a stolen 15th century Columbus letter was repatriated to to Italian officials by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

Other highlights of the sale included:

• the first edition of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, 1776, which made $151,200
• Shakespeare’s Second Folio, 1632, containing the first appearance in print of John Milton, which brought $138,600
• a Leaf of the Gutenberg Bible, from Wells' A Noble Fragment, which realized $119,700