Dickens, Scott, Swift, Wordsworth, Darwin, Adam Smith, even Napoleon; all were just warm-up acts for Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, at the top of the bill in a books and manuscripts auction held at Bonhams in London on Wednesday. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sylvia Plath’s Hermes 3000 typewriter, which sold for £26,000. Bonhams seem to have been pleasantly surprised by the amounts paid for scruffy books once owned by Plath. Her equally aged Roget’s Thesaurus, boasting “over 1,000 underlinings”, mocked its £1,000-£2,000 estimate by attracting £11,000. Did the auctioneers simply miscalculate, you wonder, or are collectors and institutions still eager to have Hughes’s books in their vitrines, but less keen than before (in the wake of the abuse allegations that surfaced recently) to have his image on their walls?

Source: The Guardian March 22, 2018 11:26 UTC