First edition of Wuthering Heights sells for£163,000 as records tumble at book sale

Records for book prices tumbled at Sotheby’s in London yesterday, in a sale including a “staggering” 163,250 paid by a US dealer for a three-volume first edition of Emily Bront’s Wuthering Heights – more than double the pre-sale estimate.

Moments earlier, a first edition of Anne Bront’s The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall fetched 85,250. It was the only copy in original binding to have turned up at auction since 1975.

The sale was the first of a series billed by Sotheby’s as “from the library of an English bibliophile – one of the finest collections of first edition books assembled in recent times – many of them inscribed by the authors”.

Yesterday’s selection from the un-named collector’s library sold for 3,160,257 and included record auction prices for a 1640 edition of William Shakespeare’s poems; a 1786 edition of Robert Burns’s poems; Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Graham Green’s Brighton Rock; Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles; and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

Top price, although not a record for the work, was 181,250 for A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, inscribed to W. C. Macready in 1843 – bought by a UK agent.

Wuthering Heights (1847) came second. Pride and Prejudice (1813) fetched 139,350 and so did the Shakespeare.

The 1859 Charles Darwin went for 127,250 and a signed 1922 copy of Ulysses, by James Joyce, for 121,250. Frankenstein (1818) fetched 115,250.

An 1896 Kelmscott edition of Chaucer’s works was 97,250. A 1920 edition of T.S. Eliot’s poems, inscribed by the author to Virginia Woolf, was 91,250.

The oldest work in the sale, a 1632 copy of Galileo Galilei’s Dialogo went for 91,250.

Peter Selley, the specialist in charge of the sale, said: “This exceptional library is attracting exceptional interest.

“Many significant records were set today – testimony to the great discrimination with which this extraordinary collection was put together.

“The quality of the works on offer drew bids from around the world, which bodes well for forthcoming sales from this same source, to be held over the next few years.”