EARLY KIPLING EDITIONS

Greymouth Evening Star, 14 January 1928, Page 8

EARLY KIPLING EDITIONS

PRICES IN THE SALEROOM. A copy of Mr Rudyard Kipling’s “The Smith Administration,” printed at Allahabad in 1891, was sold by auction in New York recently for 14,000 dollars (£2800), said to be the highest price ever paid for a book by a living writer. The purchasers were the Rosenbach Company. The copy, which includes autograph letters by Mr and Mrs Kipling relating to the book, is one of' the few remaining from the 3000 copies originally printed, ’ most of which were destroyed in connection with the copyright quqestion. A copy of “Echoes,” by Mr Kipling, published' in Lahore in 1884, was bought by the Rosenbach Company for 6000 dollars (£1200). An unpublished letter by Keats, with the first four stanzas of the “Song of Sorrow,” was bought for 6600 dollars (£1320), and an original watercolour drawing by William Blake for 6120 dollars (£1220). The first copy of the first subscribers’ edition of Colonel Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” to be offered by auction fetched 2500 dollars (£500).