Poe’s Tamerlane Sells for $420,000, Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four for $960,000

One of only two copies of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane and Other Poems in private hands has sold at auction at Sotheby's for $420,000.

One of only 11 copies located of 12 extant, the notoriously rare copy of Tamerlane was offered in its original printed tan wrappers and printed by an 18-year-old Calvin F.S. Thomas, published anonymously with the only authorship credited to "A Bostonian." Poe’s name wasn’t used until his second collection of poems Al Araaf Tamerlane and Minor Poems in 1829. The auction also featured Poe's autograph manuscript of the first eight stanzas of his poem For Annie (Fordham, New York, 1849) which went for $504,000. 

Arthur Conan Doyle’s autograph manuscript of The Sign of the Four sold for $960,000. It was accompanied by four autograph letters signed by Conan Doyle to Joseph Marshall Stoddart, editor of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, relating to the composition of the story and its first publication in that periodical. Elsewhere in the auction, Sidney Paget's original 1893 illustration of The Death of Sherlock Holmes in pen and ink and wash for the story The Adventure of the Final Problem sold for $384,000.

Other highlights, which all came from the library of surgeon and book collector Dr. Rodney P. Swantko, included:

• a rare prepublication presentation copy of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol inscribed to his friend Walter Savage Landor  who inspired the character of Lawrence Boythorn in Bleak House ($228,000)
• a first edition, first printing of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in its rare dust jacket, inscribed to Zelda’s sister Rosalind and brother-in-law Newman 'Captian' Smith ($336,000) 
• a first edition presentation copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ($108,000), inscribed by L. Frank Baum: "When in this book you take a look | My little sweetheart Beth, | Just think I writ the whole of it | And Yet am Yours 'til death – L. Frank Baum | Miss Elizabeth Hubbard of Syracuse." 
• a first edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in the rare blue first binding ($21,600)
• a first issue of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass ($132,000)
• a copy of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov inscribed to Graham Greene with a butterfly drawing ($264,000)