The sale will include a collection of rare letters penned by Doyle about an evening dinner held between himself, Oscar Wilde and JM Stoddart.
Sotheby's has a treasured collection of rare books and antique manuscripts that they set up for auction from time to time. This time, in the list of their auctions, is Arthur Conan Doyle’s sole manuscript of “The Sign of Four.” It's the original handwritten version.
As per the organization, the manuscript is expected to be sold at approximately $1.2 million, for its antiquity and quaint status among Doyle’s readers. As CNN reports, the manuscript is neat, containing only minor edits from J.M Stoddart, the American businessman and editor of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine at the time this story was written. All of Conan Doyle’s other surviving manuscripts, most of which reside in museums, similarly show little sign of being edited, said Selby Kiffer, the auction house’s international senior specialist for books and manuscripts. “Whether Doyle spent a lot of time just thinking out in his mind before he put the words down… but it seems to have sprung almost fully formed, from his mind to his pen,” he added.
The manuscript originally comes from a collection maintained by a Chicago-based collector, Dr. Rodney P. Swantko, who died two years ago. The auction, which will be held in New York on June 26 morning, will also comprise other rare books apart from Doyle’s novel. This includes four novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and some first-edition copies of “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov.
Sotheby’s, one of the world's largest auction houses and brokers of art, collectibles, jewelry, and real estate, also claims to put up a selected collection of letters by Doyle for sale. The letters correspond to a summer evening in 1889 that Doyle called a "golden evening" in his 1924 autobiography “Memories and Adventures.” On this evening, Doyle and Oscar Wilde were united at a dinner in the Langham Hotel in London by J.M Stoddart. During this meeting, it was decided that Doyle would start working on “The Sign of the Four,” his popular Sherlock Holmes novel, and Wilde would commit to writing “The Picture of Dorian Gray." Later on, as per Stoddart’s promise, Lippincott’s Magazine published Doyle’s story in 1890.
That golden evening was something that added even more value to the antique copy of Doyle’s book that is up for auction now. “It’s hard to think of two contemporary authors who might be less similar than Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde, and yet there they are at a dinner table together and talking about what they’re currently working on,” Kiffer said. “So you’re put in the milieu of the time, and that really helps (us) understand the genesis and the creation of the manuscript in a way that very seldom happens,” he added. The auction will take place as a live sale at 10 a.m. ET on June 26 in New York.
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