Day: June 17, 2011

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On the Block! ~ Austen at Auction ~ Sotheby’s June 17, 2011 ~ P&P $35,000!

UPDATE:  Results in red = Hammer price with Buyer’s Premium.

The results of today’s New York  Sotheby’s Sale No. NO8755: Fine Books and Manuscripts are in:  note the unsold items!

LOT 5

 

Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. London: T. Egerton, 1813
 SOLD for $35,000.  [estimate: 25,000—35,000 USD]

 LOT 50


Sense and Sensibility. London: Printed for the Author and published by T. Egerton, 1811  SOLD for $28,125.   [ est: 15,000—25,000 USD]

LOT 51

Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. London: T. Egerton, 1813
SOLD for $20,000.  [est: 10,000—15,000 USD]

 LOT 52

Mansfield Park.London: Printed for T. Egerton, 1814
SOLD for $5,625.  [ est: 6,000—8,000 USD]

 LOT 53

Emma: A Novel. London: Printed for John Murray, 1816
 UNSOLD [high bid $7,500] [est. 10,000—15,000 USD]

LOT 54

Northanger Abbey: and Persuasion. London, John Murray, 1818
 UNSOLD [high bid $4,250]  [est.  6,000—8,000 USD]

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The Brontes fared well today:  there were two lots of books by all three : Lot 55 sold for $80,500 [Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey]; Lot 56 sold for $33,750. [leather bound 1st editions of Emily, Charlotte and Anne, 17 volumes total]. 

Visit the Sotheby’s website for more details: browse the online catalogue here.

[Images and description text from the Sotheby’s catalogue]

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont 
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Winston Churchill on Jane Austen

My husband has been reading Winston Churchill’s The Second World War series, currently on the 5th book Closing the Ring.  He was quite excited to find this paragraph in the middle of Churchill’s writings of December 1943 when he was ill with pneumonia while in Tunis with General Eisnhower.   I have heard this quote before, and you might all be familiar with it as well, but worth a shout-out here – again showing, as Kipling had done so admirably before, how Jane Austen in time of distress is just the thing!

The days passed in much discomfort. Fever flickered in and out.  I lived on my theme of the war, and it was like being transported out of oneself. The doctors tried to keep the work away from my bedside, but I defied them.  They all kept on saying, “Don’t work, don’t worry,” to such an extent that I decided to read a novel.  I had long ago read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and now I thought I would have Pride and Prejudice.  Sarah read it to me beautifully from the foot of the bed.  I had always thought it would be better than its rival.  What calm lives they had, those people!  No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars.  Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.  All seemed to go very well with M and B*.

* “Mand B” refers to Lord Moran and Dr. Bedford who came to his aid

 From Winston Churchill, Closing the Ring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951, p. 425.

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont