What is more valuable than the rarest book in American literature? The answer will (not) surprise you. ‹ Literary Hub

June 28, 2024, 10:19 a.m.

You can contact Bradford Morrow about Poe’s Tamerlan Here.

Auctions are unpredictable beasts. If you go into them thinking you know how they will behave, you are naive. Some lots sell for far more than expected, others for much less, and often there is no explanation. Competition can be fierce, with the auctioneer taking bids from potential buyers on the phone, online, and from collectors and dealers in the saleroom. And then sometimes all three platforms falter, and a rarity like Ernest Hemingway’s first book, Three stories and ten poems (1923), uncut and unopened in its delicate glassine envelope, is “bought” – which in auction jargon means that it is not being sold.

At the Dr. Rodney P. Swantko auction held at Sotheby’s on June 26, not only the rarest book in American literature, Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlanof which only twelve copies are known, but which contains an astonishing collection of outstanding literary books and manuscripts from the 19th and 20th centuries, was full of surprises. And one surprise in particular.

Nobody had predicted that the cover of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone would fetch a higher price than Poe’s Tamerlan (420,000 US dollars), a first edition of Melville’s Moby-Dick in the rare blue first binding ($21,600), a first edition of Grass leaves (US$132,000), Lolita by Nabokov to Graham Greene with a butterfly drawing (264,000 US dollars), Charles Dickens A Christmas song in the year of publication dedicated to his close friend Walter Savage Landor (228,000 US dollars), The Great Gatsby in its rare and iconic dust jacket, gifted to Zelda’s sister and brother-in-law ($336,000), a signed first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (108,000 US dollars), Kerouac’s On the way with a dedication to Joyce Johnson (US$120,000) and the earliest known Poe autograph in private hands, “In an Album—to a River” (US$216,000) combined.

Thomas Taylor’s original illustrations from Harry Potter. Courtesy of Sotheby’s Books and Manuscripts Department.

And yet, for $1,920,000, it was. And there were still many thousands left. The most important surviving Sherlock Holmes manuscript, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Fourbrought exactly half that amount ($960,000). The boy wizard beats the master of deduction? Sidney Paget’s original 1893 drawing showing Holmes and Professor Moriarty battling over the Reichenbach Falls, illustrating “The Adventure of the Final Solution,” exceeded its high estimate of $350,000. But Harry, standing in front of the Hogwarts Express in his robes and Gryffindor scarf, fetched the highest price of the auction.

“It’s a ‘lately’ world,” quipped my bookseller friend Dan Wechsler of Sanctuary Books, to explain the enormous difference between the price of this piece of Potteriana and the rest of Swantko’s collection. (To be fair, Thomas Taylor’s watercolor and pencil on paper is as instantly recognizable a contemporary literary image as any I can think of.) We in the room sat, paddles silent, as two telephone bidders anonymously drove up the price—a scene that readers of my novel The forger’s daughter I will remember that at the auction of a fake thirteenth edition of Tamerlan.

Auctions are indeed fickle and unpredictable. Not even the world’s leading collector of Edgar Allan Poe, Susan Tane, went to Sotheby’s expecting to be the only private collector in history to own two copies of his first book. Tamerlan. She may be the only person since Calvin Thomas, who printed the pamphlet for Poe in 1827, to own more than one. But she did have one, sitting center front of the room, and there was a look of serious determination in her profile as she successfully bid on that and two important manuscripts by Poe.

The good news is that she is not only a collector, but also a philanthropist who is known to donate her books to various institutions. When I asked her after the sale what she planned to do with the rarest book in American literature, her face was relaxed as she said without pause, “I want to find the right home for it. I plan to donate one of the copies.” Even though Tamerlan Although The Poe did not set a record price at auction (Swantko himself set that price years ago when he paid $682,000 for the book), the outcome for Poe scholars and lovers could not have been better. A library or museum will hold the eleventh copy, while Tane’s other copy will remain in private hands.