George Washington letter sells at record $3.2 mn

A letter written by the first US President, George Washington, has sold at auction for $3.2m. The sale, at Christie’s in New York, was a record for a letter written by Washington. The four-page letter was written in 1787 to the president’s nephew, Bushrod Washington, and urges adoption of the country’s new constitution. A partially written poem by Edgar Allan Poe sold for $830,500 – a record for a 19th Century literary manuscript.

The manuscript of Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished, final novel, “The Original of Laura,” failed to sell — a surprise unhappy ending for a rare piece of literary history. Christie’s had estimated the 138 index cards crammed with Nabokov’s handwriting would go for 400,000 to 600,000 dollars. But bidding petered out at 280,000 dollars and the sale was abandoned.