An Irish entrepreneur paid more than half a million euro for Charles Dickens's writing desk, but he's not the only one willing to pay top dollar to own a piece of literary history, writes Rosita Boland.
THIS WEEK, a writing desk and chair belonging to Charles Dickens sold at Christie's for €550,820 - seven times the estimate - to Irish entrepreneur Tom Higgins. The furniture had impeccable provenance, having remained in the Dickens family ever since Charles died in 1870, the morning after writing two business letters at it. More importantly, it was the desk at which he had written two of his most famous novels, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities.
Still, if you were just looking for a table and chair per se, €550,820 would buy enough of them in Ikea to furnish a chain of hotels. What Higgins was really buying was that indefinable quality that infuses the sought-after possessions of famous (and usually dead) people. After the auction, Higgins, the millionaire founder of Irish Psychics Live, said that he'd possibly use the desk to write letters at, but that he didn't think he'd be writing anything of depth on it. "I don't think I'll try and raise the spirit of Dickens," he admitted.
While most literary memorabilia coming to auction tends to be either rare first editions or signed copies, items such as the Dickens desk do turn up from time to time, although few of them fetch such large sums.
Two years ago, there was a sale in New York of clothing, jewellery, photographs and books belonging to American writer Truman Capote, most famous for In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's. His own copy of In Cold Blood went for $7,000, and his passport for $3,000. More peculiar lots included an old credit card, which went for $2,750, and a piece of paper on which he had written "I know what I'm doing, except sometimes", which sold for $1,700.
Also in 2006, more than 700 items belonging to Agatha Christie, the mystery writer whose books have sold a staggering two billion copies to date, were auctioned in England.
They ranged from a pair of vases, which sold for £385, to a William and Mary silver basting spoon for £3,000. The most expensive lot was a Hispano-Flemish cabinet, which fetched £13,000. Even so, the combined total raised by the 700 lots, at £300,000, was well below what the Dickens desk and chair raised this week.
After cookery writer Elizabeth David died in 1992, the contents of her kitchen were auctioned. Everything was sold, from her much-used pots and pans to a jar of ordinary wooden spoons, which went for an amazing £400. A colander sold for £320. At those prices, it's safe to assume that the spoons and colander are long retired from messy active duty, and now on show behind glass.
In 2005 the National Portrait Gallery in London paid £27,000 for a simple pen and ink sketch of poet Ted Hughes. It wasn't a particularly skilled piece of work, but the reason the price was so high was because the portrait had been sketched in 1957 by Hughes's then-wife, Sylvia Plath. It is the only known portrait she made of him.
Appropriately, the current record paid for the world's most expensive book was set in 1994 by Bill Gates, at that time the world's wealthiest man. You may even have seen this book, bought for $30.8 million, should you have visited the Chester Beatty Library last summer, where pages from it were on display. Gates bought Leonardo Da Vinci's Codex Leicester, a 72-page notebook filled with Da Vinci's original drawings, notes and sketches. He gives it on loan for public display to a different city each year. Dublin was lucky to get it: Gates withdrew his offer to loan it to London's Victoria and Albert Museum the previous year when their lighting plan for the fragile paper exhibit failed to meet his specified requirements.
The most serious money paid by the Irish State in recent years for historic literature was the sum of €1.17 million the National Library paid in 2006 for a set of six sheets of manuscripts by James Joyce. The library had negotiated the purchase of these previously unknown manuscripts for over a year. The pages outlined early ideas for Joyce's final book, Finnegans Wake.
Of course, for many people, the first place they now look for literary memorabilia is not in an auction house catalogue, but online at eBay. At present, there is a 1955 signed first edition of Ian Fleming's James Bond novel Moonraker on offer there. It won't cost as much as Charles Dickens's desk, but it will cost you a lot more than what was paid for Elizabeth David's wooden spoons or Truman Capote's passport: starting bid is €16,438.