An original manuscript featuring Sherlock Holmes might fetch over $1 million at auction

One of the greatest mystery writers of all time, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s manuscript is all set to go up for sale and it could fetch up to a whopping $1.2 million at the auction.

The Sign of Four, Conan Doyle’s second book featuring Sherlock Holmes is now being auctioned by Sotheby’s New York, along with other literature. The manuscript features the raw first look of the book in Conan Doyle’s handwriting. As per Sotheby’s official statement, this is the most valuable Conan Doyle item ever offered at an auction.

Another major literary treasure up for sale at the auction is Conan Doyle’s letters recounting his dinner with Oscar Wilde. In 1889, the two contemporaries sat down for a dinner at the Langham Hotel in London and everything changed.

It is said that soon after this meeting, Wilde went on to write his philosophical novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Conan Doyle agreed to write The Sign of Four.

The auction will be held in New York on June 26 as a live sale.

That one ‘golden evening’ of 1889

On 30 August 1889, Joseph Marshall Stoddart, the managing editor of the American publication Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine met two of the greatest writers of the 1890s, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde. The two were invited over a dinner at Langham Hotel in London.

Stoddart was eager to produce the English version of Lippincott’s with a British editor and British contributors. It was this fateful dinner meeting that led to the release of two of the greatest stories by Wilde and Conan Doyle.

In his 1924 autobiography, Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle called the dinner meeting with Stoddart a “golden evening”, as Stoddart showed interest in commissioning his second novel.

Soon, the novel The Sign of Four made its first appearance in the February 1890 edition of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. This was the second novel featuring Sherlock Holmes after the first novel The Study in Scarlet.

The manuscript up for sale is in an immaculate state, with only a few edits by Stoddart to Americanise the spellings and some tweaks here and there by Conan Doyle, told Selby Kiffer to CNN. Kifer is the auction house’s international senior specialist for books and manuscripts.

Almost all of Conan Doyle’s surviving manuscripts are residing in museums with similar little edits.

The manuscript is just one fraction of a collection that was assembled by Dr. Rodney P. Swantko, a Chicago-based collector, who died two years ago.

Other lots include four novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of which is a copy of “The Great Gatsby” he signed from Scott and Zelda, on behalf of his wife, which is expected to fetch up to $250,000.

(With inputs from agencies)