'Impossibly Rare' Books Are Now on the Auction Block

Calling all book lovers: Christie's New York is teasing the sale of "the best collection of early American literature to come to market in a generation," per the Wall Street Journal. On offer is the nation's first spy novel, as well as its first bestseller written by a woman. There are also first editions from literary legends including Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe—"impossibly rare" works collected by Bruce Lisman, a former executive at global investment bank Bear Stearns, over 40 years. The two-day sale beginning Thursday includes more than 300 items from Lisman's collection, worth an estimated $3 million to $5 million in all.

"This is a big one, in which basically every lot is quite something," per Fine Books. An edition of Hawthorne's 1850 classic The Scarlet Letter, complete with the author's handwritten corrections, is expected to fetch at least $600,000. Lisman paid $545,100 for the page proofs in 2004, per the Journal, which reports the "small bump in price [is] designed to entice bidders." A first edition of Whitman's 1855 masterpiece Leaves of Grass, including a letter Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Whitman in praise of the book and its author, is expected to sell for $200,000, while the "true first edition" of Melville's 1851 book The Whale (also known as Moby-Dick) is expected to fetch at least $120,000.

Other items of interest: a copy of the first US spy novel, Peter Markoe's 1787 tale The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania, expected to fetch at least $10,000; a first edition of the first bestseller written by a woman in the US, Susanna Rowson's 1794 novel Charlotte. A Tale of Truth, expected to fetch at least $12,000; and the first play written and produced by an American, Thomas Godfrey's The Prince of Parthia, circa 1765, expected to sell for at least $1,000, per the Journal. There are additional works from Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, and more. (More auction stories.)