How does Hemingway size up in todays auction market?
One need only to look at the May 19, 2000 Christie’s auction (“Printed Books and Manuscripts including Americana and Recently Discovered Manuscripts by Ernest Hemingway”) to answer this question. 17 lots of rare Hemingway material amassed almost $571,000. Items included first drafts, galley proofs, letters, and manuscript portions. An autographed handwritten draft of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” sold for $248,000. According to Alane Salierno Mason, a senior editor at W. W. Norton & Company, “the ‘Macomber’ manuscript fetched the highest price ever attained in a sale of an American short story, and one of the highest for any American literary manuscript.” Typically, autographed first edition Hemingway books can fetch thousands of dollars. What increases value is any detail unique to the work. Take a first edition of Hemingway’s 1940 classic For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example, which was marked with the following inscription in the author’s hand: “For Martha Belle and Hall
