A four page letter in which the first US president, George Washington, urges adoption of the country's then brand new constitution sold for a record 3.2 million dollars at auction Friday in New York. The letter from Washington to his nephew smashed the previous auction high of 834,500 dollars for a Washington letter and handily surpassed Christie's pre-sale estimate of 1.5 to 2.5 million dollars.
The letter was star of an auction of manuscripts and books at Christie's in New York that also featured a hard-to-get first edition of the first book by legendary 19th century US poet and fiction writer Edgar Allen Poe. Poe's "Tamerlane and Other Poems," of which only a dozen copies are believed to have survived, sold for 662,500 dollars, within the pre-sale estimate of 500,000 to 700,000 dollars.
The manuscript of Vladimir Nabokov's unfinished, final novel, "The Original of Laura," failed to sell - a surprise unhappy ending for a raare piece of literary history Christie's had estimated the 138 index cards crammed with Nabokov's handwriting would go for 400,000 to 600,000 dollars. But bidding petered out at 280,000 dollars and the sale was abandoned.
The unexpected sensation of the auction was an Olivetti manual typewriter on which contemporary US novelist Cormac McCarthy, author of "No Country for Old Men" and "The Road," has written every one of his books. Estimated to sell for no more than 20,000 dollars, the battered, pale blue machine eventually went for 254,000 dollars after a two-way bidding war that culminated in tense increases of 10,000 dollars.
The winner won't just have the pleasure of owning McCarthy's faithful Olivetti - there's also an invitation to lunch with the author himself in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Christie's called the Washington letter the most important to come to auction.
In the November 9, 1787 letter, Washington strongly urges ratification of the proposed constitution that would become the bedrock of the US state, but which at the time had far from unanimous support. He tells his nephew Bushrod, who was to be a delegate in the Virginia state ratification convention, that the then two-month old document was the key to uniting the newly independent territories.
The question, he asks in the letter, was: "is it best for the States to unite, or not to unite?" But the auction house was disappointed not to see more bidding for the Nabokov manuscript, which came to auction in a flood of publicity. Nabokov's dying wish was for "The Original of Laura" to be destroyed. Instead, the Nabokov family kept the densely filled index cards in near secrecy for three decades before having the work published last month in New York and London.
Comments
Comments are closed.