Another WW II veteran, John Pistone, is doing something I'm not quite sure I could bring myself to do in his circumstances: He is returning to Germany an invaluable book taken as a war-time trophy. The 87-year-old Ohio native isn't surrendering just any book, either. The one in his possession for more than 60 years is an art book that belonged to Hitler himself.

It is important for the understanding of this post that you understand that I live three miles from Phoenicia, New York, a village that is two blocks long, but has a library.  There. That's as much of the back story as you need to know.  Let's begin ... 

When I obsess, I like to choose something small. Let others focus in on their dysfunctional relatives, or their receding hairline, or whether Fiji will disappear when the oceans rise. Been there, neuroticised about that.

I choose to hunt in my own pack for flotsam other obessive-compulsives would ignore as chump change.

And so this is how I began my quest for what I soon decided was the most under-appreciated out-of-print novel ever written. My obsession began on a Sunday in the early 1990s. 

After the American Revolution, New Yorkers remembered with pride their colony's nearly-forgotten Dutch roots. John Pintard, the influential patriot and antiquarian who founded the New York Historical Society in 1804, promoted St. Nicholas as patron saint of both society and city. In January 1809, Washington Irving joined the society and on St. Nicholas Day that same year, he published the satirical fiction, Knickerbocker's History of New York, with numerous references to a jolly St. Nicholas character. This was not the saintly bishop, rather an elfin Dutch burgher with a clay pipe. These delightful flights of imagination are the source of the New Amsterdam St. Nicholas legends: that the first Dutch emigrant ship had a figurehead of St. Nicholas: that St. Nicholas Day was observed in the colony; that the first church was dedicated to him; and that St. Nicholas comes down chimneys to bring gifts. Irving's work was regarded as the "first notable work of imagination in the New World."

Times are supposed to be tough, right? The market is flat, people are cutting back, collectors, like everyone else, are supposedly hunkering down. That may well be true, but one must be ever mindful of human nature when it involves the desire to own great stuff. This was best expressed to me some years ago by the eminent bookman Stephen Massey on whether or not he was concerned that a hot prospect would return to bid on a coveted item after being rude during a preliminary visit to an auction gallery, and told to leave the building. "If the book's good enough," Massey said, "they will always call back—they will crawl—if they really want the book."

Which brings me to yesterday's sale of fine printed books, manuscripts and Americana at Christie's in New York, which totaled $6.4 million for 144 lots, or 82 percent of the 197 lots put on the block. Fully half of the money spent, $3.2 million, went for a 1787 letter written by George Washington to his nephew, Bushrod Washington, urging adoption of the new Constitution, pictured here, a world record for a Washington document of any sort. A ton of money, to be sure, but not a big surprise, given the uniqueness of the item, and its unquestioned value as both collectible and historical artifact. The same can be said for the $830,000 and $362,000 spent, respectively, for two lots of manuscript verses in the hand of Edgar Allan Poe', also unique.

But then we come to the copy of Poe's Tamerlane, for the past nineteen years the property of the distinguished Hollywood television producer William E. Self, which sold for $662,500, a record for a 19th-century book of poetry at auction. That was a cool half-million dollars more than Self paid for it in 1990 at the H. Bradley Martin sale in New York, an exciting contest I witnessed, and which persuaded me to set up an interview with Self for A Gentle Madness (pp. 420-426). "I don't think you can say you ever have a great Poe collection," he told me then, "unless you have a Tamerlane." Another notable item in yesterday's sale: $218,500 for an 1855 edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass—like the Tamerlane, self-published by the author, making the pair, probably, the two most valuable vanity books in American literary history.

And then there is the matter of Cormac McCarthy's typewriter, which the New York Times wrote about a few days before the sale, an old Olivetti manual that the author bought around 1960 for $50, and on which he banged out, by his own estimate, some 5 million words, including the texts of all his books. Christie's estimated the machine, now inoperable, might bring in $15,000 to $20,000, with a pet McCarthy charity, the Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico, to receive all the proceeds. 

So what happens in yesterday's sale? A winning bid of $254,500 for what, in the collecting world, is known simply as a "material object," an item that by itself has no scholarly value whatsoever, and is coveted strictly for its relationship to the source of creativity. This is-what Reynolds Price told me had motivated him to buy a particular copy of  Paradise Lost, not because of its textual importance, but because it was the copy owned by the daughter who took John Milton's dictation during his years of blindness. "For me, it was like the apostolic succession," Price said. "I was touching the hand that touched the hand that touched the Hand."

A final note: According to Christies, eight of the top ten purchases were made by private individuals, all but one of them Americans; a British dealer was listed as the buyer of a Charles Dickens lot, $158,500 for Nicholas Nickelby; an American dealer paid $182,500 for a copy of Poe's The Raven and Other Poems.