Today, 14 November 2023, was the Bonhams Fine Books and Manuscripts auction of twenty-five lots of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes books from the property, or now former property of Frieda Hughes. In the last few years, the Plath and Hughes rare book market has been simply flooded with stock but this has not, at least in the case of Plath who is more collectible than Hughes, meant that prices in the rare and antiquarian book market has stalled or leveled off.  As I have done in the past, here are a list of the sales. All prices below show hammer price first and then the final price including the buyer's premium. Please see the Bonhams website for pre-auction valuation estimates. In addition to the property of Frieda Hughes, there was a scarce uncorrected proof of the Victoria Lucas edition of The Bell Jar  in: Lot 72 :  This gorgeous book is estimated to sell for £4,000 - £5,000 (US$4,900 - US$6,200) and ultimately went for £6,144. Estimated: Untracked Hammer Price: Unt...

The following are the lots in the 14 November 2023 auction of The Property of Frieda Hughes of Sylvia Plath (lots 108-118) and Ted Hughes (lots 94-107) items. Ted Hughes: Lot 94 : HUGHES (TED) Meet My Folks!, FIRST EDITION, DEDICATION COPY, INSCRIBED, Faber and Faber, 1961 Lot 95 : HUGHES (TED) The New Poetry. A Selection Selected and Introduced by A. Alvarez, FIRST EDITION, PRESENTATION COPY INSCRIBED BY TED HUGHES TO HIS PARENTS, 1962; 3 carbons TH poems of 1960s, and annotated copy of Moorehead's Cooper's Creek (6) Lot 96 : HUGHES (TED) Wodwo, FIRST EDITION AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION COPY INSCRIBED "To Walter [Hughes] & Alice with love from Ted, May 67", Faber and Faber, 1967 Lot 97 : HUGHES (TED) Animal Poems, UNIQUE PRESENTATION COPY, ONE OF SIX COPIES INTERLEAVED WITH ALL 14 POEMS WRITTEN OUT BY THE AUTHOR, AND AN ADDITIONAL 18 POEMS ADDED IN MANUSCRIPT, [Richard Gilbertson, [1967] Lot 98 : HUGHES (TED) The Iron Man, FIRST EDITION, AUTHOR'S PRESENT...

Bonhams Knightsbridge is set to auction more than two dozen lots of books from the library and collection of Frieda Hughes that she was either given or inherited from her parents, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.  The date of the auction is 14 November 2023.  Copies of works by Sylvia Plath include: A Winter Ship, The Colossus, The Bell Jar, Ariel, Three Women, Crystal Gazer and Other Poems, Pursuit, Letters Home , and much, much more. Copies of works by Ted Hughes include: The Iron Giant, Birthday Letters, Howls & Whispers, Poems by Emily Dickinson, Animal Poems, Moortown Elegies, Meet My Folks!, Crow, The Iron Man, Wodwo , and more.

On 19 February 1956, 65 years ago today, Sylvia Plath was in Whitstead at Cambridge writing in her journal. It was a Sunday night. That day she had walked to Grantchester with Christopher Levenson, the skies were gray and the landscape white but visible were browns and greens of the earth. She met John Lythgoe for tea and she read in Macbeth . These details are from her pocket calendar. Her simultaneously kept desk calendar, which tracked her academic doings, indicated she was with Chris from 10 to 1 and John from 2 to 7. It details that she finished reading O'Neill and read Ronsard, Webster, and Euripides in addition to Macbeth.  She wrote one letter that day, to Jon Rosenthal.  Her journal, written that night, details quite a bit more. It started out almost as a letter: "To whom it may concern: Every now and then there comes a time when the neutral and impersonal forces of the world turn and come together in a thunder-crack of judgment." And she went on to say: Today my...

The below is a generous guest blog post by Tammy MacNeil on her recent Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: The Property of Frieda Hughes Bonhams auction victory. Congratulations on the win, but more importantly on your pregnancy. ~pks A Blue Wool Hooded Coat by Tammy MacNeil, 17 April 2018 The announcement in late January 2018 that Frieda Hughes would be selling a large lot of her famous parents' personal possessions garnered attention in the press on both sides of the Atlantic. More than one Plath devotee wondered if this would be their opportunity to own something that had once belonged to Sylvia Plath herself. I have been a follower of Plath's for about twenty years, having written my Master's thesis on her work's influence on Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters . I believed that this auction was my chance to own a small piece of Plath history. But what piece? Much as Peter K. Steinberg describes in his telling of winning Plath's fishing rod , narrowing my focus t...

Going into Bonhams fascinating Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Property of Frieda Hughes auction I was completely torn about bidding. Of course Plath herself, in the guise and persona of "Lady Lazarus", predicted how her readers would covet "a piece of my hair or my clothes". And having been lucky enough to acquire, previously, something that Plath created as well as being gifted a typescript story , there is always the desire to have more. I ranked some of the lots that most interested me and that would not completely destroy my meagre piggy bank from the moment I saw the draft sales catalogue in January. I was completely taken with the idea of owning something as random and frivolous as Plath's fishing rod ( Lot 351 ). But something in me said go for something else. So I marked down Lot 334 ("A Winter Ship") as being idea. Copies are available but not one that was retained for 58 years by the family. I was interested also in the small lot of boo...

Like you, maybe, I am still fascinated and a bit mystified by the auction last week in London of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: The Property of Frieda Hughes . I am still overly curious as to which items might end up in libraries and archives; which lots went to private collectors; and which will be seen, temporarily and with a mark up, via book or artifact dealers. I went through and made a spreadsheet of the lots with the estimates, the hammer prices and the final price including the buyer's premium. Lastly I filled in a column in Excel to denote if the item was withdrawn (1 lot); did not sell (8 lots); was under estimate (17 lots); in estimate (17 lots); or  over estimate (65 lots) The large majority went for over the high estimate, even if just barely. The in estimate could be further broken down by whether it was low, mid, or high within that estimate price range but I frankly did not want to go that far... Well, I do, but indexing the second volume of The Letters...