Scarlet Letter Proofs Sold

A printer’s copy of the The Scarlet Letter, annotated with some 700 marks in Hawthorne’s own hand, was sold at auction at Christie’s for $545,000. According to Terry Belanger on the SHARP-L list, “The winning bidder was The Nineteenth Century Shop in Baltimore; the hammer price was $480,000. The University of Virginia was the underbidder.” The sale price doubled expectations.

More information here and here.

We get The 19th Century Shop’s catalog, and they’re gorgeous productions in their own right. Not that we can afford to buy anything, but if you’re a bibliophile you really should be on their mailing list. One hopes there will be some provision for scholarly access, since the importance of this literary artifact cannot be overstated; it’s worth noting that C19 American literature is where Fredson Bowers put his influential theories of critical editing to the test, precisely because of the lack of extant manuscripts corrected by their author.