Posted on 01/27/2003 12:28:19 PM PST by RJCogburn
The auction of Ayn Rand manuscripts, rare editions, and memorabilia proved to be a landmark sale, establishing Rand as one of a very small group of literary figures whose manuscripts and rare editions are most eagerly sought by collectors.
The auction of Ayn Rand papers and various other memorabilia, from the holdings of Barbara Branden and Robert Hessen (with a handful from others' collections), was a major event for collectors of Rand material. The sale included about 4,500 pages of Rand's manuscripts, 19 inscribed books (many of them first editions), other autographed books, plus miscellaneous material ranging from signed publishing contracts to souvenir cigarettes and film posters. A few pieces of Randiana have been sold at auction over the years, but mostly the material was pretty inconsequential: for example, a few years ago, the Ayn Rand Institute auctioned off two small boxes of pebbles that Rand had picked up along the highway in Colorado while on a cross-country trip. In competitive bidding, Rand's admirers paid hundreds of dollars for the pebbles, leading some to wonder whether Rand's admirers were willing to treat anything she ever touched as religious icons — and leading others to wonder whether there might be a lot of demand for Rand material. But most of what little Rand memorabilia came into the marketplace was sold discreetly in private sales, so no one really knew what to expect.
Manuscript collectors and dealers have a pretty good idea what sort of prices most manuscripts will bring, based on sales records and the bidding at previous auctions. "A short story by Edgar Allen Poe might bring $5,000," one collector told me, "and a chapter from Huckleberry Finn around $20,000." What about nonfiction essays by well-known novelists? "Usually not much," he said. "Perhaps $500 or so."
But there had been no previous sales of Rand manuscripts, so whether they would bring prices comparable to writing by literary giants like Twain or Poe remained an open question. There were well-known rumors about the enthusiasm, if not downright fanaticism, of her admirers. And surely the story of the pebbles made the rounds. But no one had any real idea.
The Branden-Hessen sale included a few items that could only be considered souvenirs, though none as silly as the Colorado pebbles. But it also included a huge quantity of Rand's manuscripts. From Barbara Branden came 29 handwritten pages of Atlas Shrugged and a few letters and manuscripts of unpublished working papers. As outstanding as Branden's papers were, they were easily eclipsed by those from Robert Hessen's holdings, which included nearly 200 manuscripts, comprising virtually everything Rand wrote after 1961. In addition, the sale included over 50 of Rand's books, nearly all inscribed by the author, and dozens of letters, pamphlets, photographs, audio tapes, and miscellaneous ephemera.
It was, in short, a remarkable sale of Randiana, including an extensive group of manuscripts that will not likely ever again be available at a single sale. Virtually everyone who collects Rand material was either present or was represented by an agent.
The Sign of the Dollar
The auction was conducted more-or-less in chronological order. The first item to go up for bids was a studio photograph of Rand's family, taken around 1909. It was hammered down at $1,100. The next was two baby photographs of Rand, which realized $862.50.* The third lot was a publicity photo Rand had inscribed to her brother-in-law, which drew $3,450. The sale was off to an excellent start.
The first item to break the $10,000 barrier came only a few minutes later, when a letter from Rand to Barbara Branden's mother was hammered down at $12,000 (or $13,800 with buyer's fee). Moments later the first of the manuscripts went up for sale: a nine-page draft of an unfinished essay entitled "Consciousness, Purpose & Happiness," which Rand had written in 1955 to help clarify her thoughts in preparation for writing "Galt's Speech" for Atlas Shrugged. It sold for $14,950.
The very next lot was one of the most important: 29 pages from Rand's original manuscript for Atlas Shrugged. The pages were mostly non-consecutive, and came from Part II, chapters 2 and 3. Bidding started at $30,000 and rose quickly in increments of $5,000 to $10,000 until the lot was hammered down at $210,000 (or $233,000 including the buyer's fee).
While the audience caught its breath, a snapshot of Rand "taken at the completion of Atlas Shrugged" was sold for $3,450, an 8x10 publicity photo inscribed to Branden and her husband sold for $9,775, and a package with nine "Who is John Galt?" cigarettes, complete with gold dollar signs on each cigarette, sold for $3,737.50. At more than $400 each, this may be the highest price ever paid for cigarettes. Then came more ephemera and five different inscribed copies of Atlas Shrugged, which realized prices ranging from $6,325 to $18,400.
A dust jacket from the 1936 edition of We The Living, complete with Rand's notes revising its text for the 1959 edition, sold for $3,167.50, followed by a single lot including copies of We The Living and The Fountainhead inscribed to the Blumenthals, which sold for $4,887.50. Two additional inscribed copies of the 1959 We The Living sold at $2,300 and $1,955.
Five inscribed copies of For the New Intellectual followed, realizing prices ranging from $1,955 (for a copy inscribed to Barbara Branden's mother) to $3,162.50 (for copies inscribed to Barbara Branden and to Robert Hessen). After an autographed (but not inscribed) copy of For the New Intellectual sold for $1,840 and an 8x10 photo inscribed to Robert Hessen sold for $2,875, the auctioneer announced the first of the manuscripts from the Hessen collection.
It was a 61-page manuscript of "America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business," a talk she delivered at Ford Hall Forum in Boston in 1961. When the bidding stopped, it had pulled in a whopping $48,875, twice the pre-auction estimate. "Art and Sense of Life" then sold for $18,400, followed by "The Fascist New Frontier," which brought $57,500.
As those in attendance caught their breath, the publication contract for The Virtue of Selfishness (then called Rational Self-Interest) was hammered down for $2,250 ($2,587.50 with the buyer's fee) and a copy of the scarce hardback edition of Virtue, without inscription or autograph, sold for $402.50. Then the publication contract for Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal sold for $3,450 and two copies (of 700 produced) of a special boxed, hardbound edition of that book sold for $2,185 and $2,587.50.
Auction fever was evident as the next items — a postcard and a letter from Rand to her house-sitter — went for $2,300 and $1,035 respectively. And then it was time for the first large group of Rand's manuscripts to go up for bids.
The lot consisted of the manuscripts for the entire run of Rand's weekly newspaper column. The manuscripts for the 26 columns include nearly 300 pages. This was the largest lot of Rand's manuscripts to be offered up to this point. It hauled in $90,500.
There followed a single sentence in Rand's handwriting intended as copy for the announcement of publication of The Objectivist, which sold for $373.50. And then it was time for the lot that everyone had waited for.
Lot 5901 consisted of 165 manuscripts, including everything Rand wrote for the three publications she edited, The Objectivist Newsletter (1962965), The Objectivist (19661971) and The Ayn Rand Letter (19711976). All told, this lot included 3,940 pages in Rand's handwriting. The material wasn't as exciting as the pages from the Atlas Shrugged manuscript. But there was so much of it! Bidding started at $250,000, and rose in increments of $10,000 until it reached $400,000 (with buyer's fee, $442,500).
The following three lots were copies of the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Atlas Shrugged, with special binding, slipcase and autograph of Rand. One copy, with an additional inscription to Bea Hessen, sold for $3,450; the other two sold for $1,900 and $2,250. The next two items were related to the production by NBI Theater of a dramatic version of The Fountainhead. The contract between Barbara Branden (who wrote the script) and Rand realized $2,875; a typewritten copy of the script, initialed by both Rand and Branden, went for $12,650.
Then came two of the most interesting items in the entire sale: two brief manuscripts in which Rand attempted to deal with the loss of the love of Nathaniel Branden, both written on June 5, 1968, during the period in which Nathaniel would neither renew his sexual relationship with Rand nor explain to her that he had found a new love. The first, three pages of notes entitled "Psycho-Epistemology," sold for $4,600. The second, "The Moral Authority Premise," running nine pages, sold for $9,400.
The remainder of the sale consisted mostly of contracts and miscellaneous documents. Among these were the only two items that failed to meet the minimum bid set by the consignors: a contract between Rand and Erika Holzer for an article Holzer had written for The Objectivist and a screenplay by Holzer for a courtroom drama with handwritten editorial comments from Rand.
There were three other manuscripts. An edited excerpt of her essay "The Anti-Industrial Revolution" which had appeared in The Objectivist in 1970 netted $13,800. The second, a 17-page manuscript entitled "Why I Like Stamp Collecting," written in 1971 for publication in Minkus Stamp Journal, was offered with a copy of the published version and a copy of Atlas Shrugged, inscribed to "Mr. and Mrs. Jack Minkus," publishers of Minkus Stamp Journal and in-laws of Robert Hessen. It drew $3,163, which may have been a bargain, at least in comparison to other items in the sale. The final manuscript was a draft of a speech on tax reform from 1972, in which Rand severely criticized Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. This nine-page manuscript realized $13,800.
The balance of the sale consisted of miscellaneous documents either signed or annotated by Rand, a handful of her books, uninscribed and unsigned, and three collections of Rand's books, some inscribed or autographed, that were consigned by individuals who were not part of Rand's circle. The final lot consisted of the stopwatch Rand used to time scenes of the Italian film version of We The Living, while she worked on editing it for release in the U.S., along with some posters for the release of the film, which occurred some 6 years after Rand's death. This was the last chance to acquire a Rand relic, and it pulled an impressive $1,300.
All told, the sale realized a very impressive $1,178,602.50. Barbara Branden's items fetched $376,301.25. Robert Hessen's parcels garnered $724,647.50. Items consigned by others — Daryn Kent-Duncan, Jim Peron, Joan Blumenthal, Henry Holzer, Barbara Efron, Paul Eisen, and Ryan York — sold for a total of $77,653.75.
When auctioning a collection, conventional wisdom recommends breaking it into small lots, except in cases of extremely inexpensive material. The reason is simple: more people can afford to buy less expensive lots, and the more bidders, the higher the prices will likely climb. So one has to wonder why the sale included two huge lots: the lot of 26 newspaper columns totalling some 283 pages and the lot of all Rand's writing for The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, and The Ayn Rand Letter, totalling some 3,940 manuscript pages and 15 typescript pages.*
Robert Hessen knew well that they would likely realize substantially higher prices if broken into smaller lots. But he insisted on selling them in the two large lots, in hopes that they would find a home at a major research institution, either via direct institutional purchase or by route of donation from the purchaser.
The conventional wisdom proved correct in this case. An examination of the auction results suggests that the manuscripts would indeed have sold for substantially higher prices had they been offered as single manuscripts. Seven lots consisted of a single nonfiction manuscript, containing a total of 189 pages. Taken together, these seven manuscripts sold for $181,125, or an average of $958 per page. The two huge multiple-manuscript lots contained a total of 187 manuscripts, totalling 4,223 pages. They sold for a total of $533,000, or an average of $126 per page.
In fact, there was an almost perfect inverse relationship between lot size and the price per page each lot realized:
Lot Page Count Price per page "Psycho-epistemology" 3 $1,533 "Pollution" 5 2,760 "The Moral Authority Premise" 9 1,022 "On Tax Reform" 9 1,533 "Consciousness, Purpose and Happiness" 9 1,661 "Art as Sense of Life" 39 472 "The Fascist New Frontier" 54 1,065 "America's Persecuted Minority" 61 801 The Newspaper Columns 283 320 The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, The Ayn Rand Letter 3940 112
Did Hessen get the result he had hoped for? The identity of the buyers of the two large lots has not been publicly revealed, but one source told me that they were acquired by one or more dealers who intend to sell them individually to collectors. (One rumor has it that Bill Gates was a buyer. A dealer who often represents Gates was a buyer of some of the material, though not the mega-lot. This speculation was discounted by a dealer familiar with Gates and his modus operandi: "Gates always issues a press release when he makes a major acquisition.")
To what extent were the prices realized at the sale the product of genuine collector or scholarly demand, and to what extent were they the result of bidders catching "auction fever," of the sort that gripped buyers at Sotheby's sale of stuff from Jacqueline Kennedy's home in 1996? It's impossible to know, at least until the material starts selling in other auctions. One collector of Rand material, as well as other manuscripts and rare books, told me he thought the prices were ridiculously high. "Twenty-nine pages from Atlas Shrugged sold for more than ten times the price of a chapter from Huck Finn," he said. "Many of her essays realized thousands of dollars, in some cases a hundred times what essays of other great novelists bring." Not surprisingly, he predicted that when the material acquired at the sale starts showing up at other auctions, its owners will take huge losses, like the losses the buyers of Jackie Kennedy relics now suffer when they resell their treasures.
But one dealer who bid extensively at the auction told me that he thought the stuff went cheap. "The large lots, if broken up, ought to bring around $10,000 per manuscript if sold at a first-rate auction house in New York or London," he said. The reason that Rand material should be among the most valuable of all literary collectibles? "Ayn Rand has no equivalent," he said. "She has a following among libertarians, financial gurus, all sorts of people." I asked him whether he had been a buyer (or partial buyer) of the two huge lots. He refused to answer.
In the wake of the sale, the market for Rand books, manuscripts and memorabilia seems extremely strong. But only time will tell whether demand is solid at the price levels achieved at the auction. Material from the sale will likely be sold at public auction in the near future. And it's likely other material will also. Rand inscribed a lot of books in her lifetime, and there may be as many as thousands of other manuscript pages somewhere out there. If there are, chances are very good that the prices realized at this sale will attract them to the auction block.
But one thing is certain: there will never be another sale of Rand material like this one.
* The figures do not include one lot, whose catalog description did not include any page count.
Doing a FR search for "ayn," or "Ayn," or "Rand" will not bring up this article.
I was here earlier and went to find it again, but the above failed searches sent me to RJCogburn's home page to review his forum activity.
After locating the post that way, I was again able to locate it using the search word "selling."
Ayn Rand is, perhaps, the finest rational philosopher ever -- even better than Aristotle -- but she is vehemently hated by some Christian types.
It looks to me like Ayn Rand is on a FR moderator code word hit list.
What a shame.
The keyword search works
now. I added the key words.
You could have done that
before you assumed
there was a conspiracy.
(Rand gets talked about
a lot around here.
Libertarians still try
to ride her coat tails...)
I'd appreciate comments from others attempting to pull this thread up using the search words Ayn or Rand.
Nothing beats substantiation.
You just gotta bump a word like that!
(Hmmmm.....wonder what Alan Greenspan has in his attic?)
I think you need at least a 4 letter word, so "Ayn" is a no-go.
I ran a search and while I didn't get this one, I got other threads using "Rand".
Curious.
It looks like Eddie willers (three letters are not enough) and jiggyboy are right. The search engine seems to demand whole word matching; when searching for Rand, there has to be a blank space following the letters Rand in the titles searched.
Go to FR's home
page. Use the search engine there.
Choose a keyword search.
The general search
engine is always shakey.
The keyword search works.
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