Charlie Watts’ copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles inscribed by Conan Doyle was hammered down at £170,000 at Christie’s – an auction record.
The collection of the late Stones drummer was sold in two parts with a live sale in London on September 28 followed by a Christie's online sale that closed on September 29.
Watts’ copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles: Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was the first presentation copy to be offered at auction for more than 30 years. In original pictorial red cloth gilt, it was inscribed by the author on the title page I perambulated Dartmoor before I wrote this book, A Conan Doyle. An ownership inscription dated 1902 on the front endpaper suggests the recipient was LB Whitehead, an artist from Devon who specialised in local scenes.
The Hound of the Baskervilles, inspired by Doyle’s walks across Dartmoor in 1901, was first serialised in the Strand Magazine and published in book form by George Newnes, London, in 1902.
Charlie Watts’ copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles that sold at Christie's was inscribed by Conan Doyle.
The story was the first Holmes adventure since the publication of The Final Problem in which the detective disappears over the Reichenbach Falls.
There had been no inscribed copy at auction since the Richard Manney copy (Sotheby’s New York, 1991) which bore the rather less interesting and more typical Doyle inscription Yours very ty Arthur Conan Doyle.
Estimated at £70,000-100,000 here, it took £170,000 (£214,200 including buyer’s premium), among the leading prices of the sale led by an inscribed copy of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby at £180,000.
The overall hammer total for the first day of the sale reached £2.18m (£2.75m when including buyer’s premium).
More on this auction in a future issue.
