Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

A rare first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s first book Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) sold at auction on December 4th for a record-breaking $622,500. This copy was one of a number of books from the library of TV and film producer William E. Self that were auctioned last week by Christie’s auction house. According to Christie’s only fifty copies of Tamerlane and Other Poems were printed and of those only about a dozen survive

1st Edition of Tamerlane and Other Poems.

Poe was of course one of the pioneers of weird fiction and his influence on the later Weird Tales generation, including Lovecraft, Smith, Howard, et al., cannot be overstated. He is generally given credit for writing one of the first detective stories, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” He also dabbled in the “lost civilizations” genre with his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a work inspired by the Hollow Earth theories of John Symmes and in which the protagonist encounters a mysterious race at the southpole.

Also, from the William E. Self library, a first edition of Poe’s The Raven and other Poems (1845) sold for $182,500 and a first edition of the two volume set Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) sold for $43,750. Several Poe manuscripts sold for amounts in the six-figure range. A first edition of the aforementioned The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) sold for $6875.

There were several other works in this particular auction that should be of interest to fans of speculative fiction. A re-bound first edition of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1918) sold for $50,000. A first published edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1866) went for $21,250. H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man: a Grotesque Romance (1897) sold for $750 and a very nice first edition, first state McClurg copy (no dustjacket) of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1914) sold for $3000