Held by Hindman (25/20/12% buyer’s premium), it comprised a 266-lot collection of 19th and 20th century American and English literature consigned by just one New Orleans collector.
Only a handful of lots in the collection failed to sell.
Bid to $15,200 (£10,965) was a 1932, first issue copy of John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven, an early work that did not sell well at the time and is now hard to find.
This copy contained not only a lengthy and admiring inscription to a fellow writer, Louis Paul, but a slightly later, tipped-in note from Steinbeck to Paul in which he mentions the book's apparent scarcity.
First issue copy of Ernest Hemingway’s Men without Women – $7600 (£5485) at Hindman.
Among Hemingway lots on offer was a 1927 first of Men without Women that sold for $7600 (£5485). The book’s original $2 price tag was still present, but more significantly where this book is concerned it weighed 15½oz, which marks it out as one of the first issue copies that were printed on a better quality and heavier paper.
The 1955 Olympia Press, paperback first of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita that, together with a 1959 UK first, made $2800 (£2020) at Hindman.
A very different novel that made it first appearance in print in 1955, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, reached $2800 (£2020).
In the original green wrappers, this was a two-volume first issue produced by the Olympia Press in Paris, the book not being published in the US or the UK until 1959. A copy of the latter, a Macmillan edition, complete with jacket, was part of the lot.
Kurt Vonnegut’s self-portrait on the half-title of a 1969 first of his Slaughterhouse- Five… that made $3600 (£2595) at Hindman.
A 1969 first issue of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children’s Crusade took $3600 (£2595).
The author, who based this anti-war classic on his own experiences as a POW who survived the devastating bombing of Dresden in 1945, has added a signed self-portrait drawing to the half-title of this copy.
Only a signed copy has made more at auction – $5000 at Sotheby’s New York in 2018.
