Manuscripts & drawings of John Lennon auctioned
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E-mail CNTV, June 6, 2014
It was a big auction on Wednesday at Sotheby's for fans of John Lennon. Whimsical drawings, poems and short stories from two humorous books he produced in the 1960s fetched sky-high prices, including 200,000 US Dollars for a nine-page parody of Sherlock Holmes.
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Manuscripts and drawings of John Lennon fetch high prices |
The manuscript "The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield" was the top lot in the sale, and had been estimated to bring 50,000 to 70,000 US dollars. The material was created for the two critically acclaimed books Lennon published during the height of Beatlemania.
Sotheby's said that all of the 89 lots sold, with 83 percent selling above the pre-sale high estimate.
"I think the drawings are something that someone can obviously frame and put on the wall, so there's a lot of people competing for those. And there are a lot of people competing for the manuscripts as well, but it seems to be the more visual the lot is, the better the result," said Richard Austin, head of Books & Manuscripts, Sotheby's.
"In his Own Write" is a collection of 31 short stories and poems full of puns and spelling errors published in 1964. It was a big hit with reviewers, who compared Lennon to Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. It was followed a year later by "A Spaniard in the Works," its title a pun on the British term "a spanner in the works."
The collection belonged to Lennon's British publisher Tom Maschler, who held on to it for a half-century. Sotheby's describes it as the largest private collection of the Beatles' work to come to market. Before becoming famous as a musician, Lennon, who was fatally shot in 1980, trained as an artist at the Liverpool School of Art.
A cartoon of a boy with six birds that appeared in "A Spaniard in the Works" sold for 27,500 US dollars on Wednesday. The drawing was used 30 years later as the cover for the Beatles' single "Free as a Bird."
And finally, "The Fat Budgie," a beloved nonsensical poem with the title written on the margin, and a handwritten manuscript called "I Sat Belonely", all went for around 140,000 dollars, about four times its pre-sale estimate.
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