The Annette Campbell-White collection of modern firsts (posted about here) sold for a total of £1.3 million (including commission) at auction yesterday, Bloomberg reports, short of the £1.8 million ($3.6 million) it had been expected to fetch. Twenty-six percent of the lots failed to sell. A first edition of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was the highest-priced item, selling for £70,000 before commission. A second copy of Gatsby, which had repairs, did not sell.
"A draft of 'Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party,' from 1978-1980, went for £42,000, a record for a Graham Greene manuscript."
Buyers said higher prices weren't realized because many of the books had been recently purchased at auction, so their values have't increased substantially.
