An anonymous American buyer paid $153,600 for a love letter from poet John Keats (1795-1821) to his neighbor Fanny Brawne. In the poignant document, as we reported earlier, the dying Keats expresses his anguish at the separation caused by his illness. Few Keats letters exist, and it was a record price for one sold at auction. It wasn’t, however, the highest priced item at the Bonhams auction in London. That was the $163,000 paid for an autographed manuscript by Sir Isaac Newton.
Among the other high sellers at the auction were an autographed letter from James Joyce, describing his difficulty in publishing “Ulysses,” which fetched $54,000, and an autographed letter from explorer David Livingstone (1813-1873) to English Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, reporting on Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition of 1858-1864. It brought $47,000.
Read more at Bonhams.
