Charlie Watts’ Fine Books And Rare Jazz Memorabilia Collections Ring Up $4.6 Million At Christie’s

Charlie Watts’ rare-book and jazz memorabilia collections exited their two-part sale at Christie’s with impressive results on September 28-9, ringing up a total, minus fees, of $4.6 million and change for 500-plus lots, the stellar lot being an inscribed first edition of Jazz Age chronicler F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which went for $276,627 (plus fees).

At that gavel price, it was a bargain. The book was a personal gift of Fitzgerald’s, hilariously inscribed to a close friend during the California years, fellow contract-MGM script doctor Harold Goldman, as a kind of RSVP to Goldman’s standing invitation to a — what else, in Fitzgerald’s case — drunken soiree, or, seemingly, to a lost weekend of them. The volume is the quintessence of the Jazz Age and of that author’s immense contribution to the latter-day myth-making of the epoch between the wars. Not least, as a centerpiece for a fine collection of 20th-century authors, its presence in the sale demonstrated the puckish-yet-serious intellectual facets of the Rolling Stones’ timekeeper perfectly.

Put another way, Mr. Watts’ selection of authors were responsible for breaking some fifteen author’s records (at auction) on September 28-9 at Christie’s, among them James Baldwin, Evelyn Waugh, Langston Hughes, Dame Agatha Christie, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Prices in almost all cases exceeded their estimates, some by orders of magnitude. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, arguably the ultimate post-war absurdist/nihilistic text, went for $18,144 and change, or nearly three times its estimate. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, his most famous book thanks to the BBC series, pulled in $73,767.46, double its high-end estimate. At $38,420.55, Agatha Christie’s Death On The Nile exceeded its high-end estimate by a factor of six.