Enlarged for catalogue illustration, but actually displayed beneath the two portraits of the writer in the illustration right is a note in which Edgar Allan Poe acknowledges receipt of $3 from John Bisco, a sum paid to him in April 1845 on behalf of the Southern Literary Messenger.
The lot was sold at the auction September 3 for $60,000 (£45,250) by University Archives (25% buyer’s premium).
The …Messenger was a Richmond (Virginia) literary journal that Poe had edited in the 1830s and though it cannot be proven, said the cataloguer, this would appear to be payment for his having granted permission for the magazine to reprint his by then famous poem.
It seems that Poe was keen to take advantage of the fine typography of the journal and to reach its many intellectual and influential readers.
In Newton's hand
Sold at $40,000 (£30,165) was a single leaf in Isaac Newton’s hand that was said to date from around 1700-10.
This was not something relating to the great man’s scientific work, but to his religious writings of later life. The saleroom suggested that it perhaps formed a portion of his unfinished treatise on the history of the Roman Catholic church – referring specifically to the Arian heresy, a doctrine of 4th century origin that denied the divinity of Jesus and contested the idea of a Holy Trinity.
