Two important sales at Christie's New York this week:

Yesterday afternoon saw the sale of Beautiful Evidence: The Library of Edward Tufte, in 160 lots. Of those, 127 sold, bringing in a total of $1,817,187. Galileo's Sidereus nuncius (1610) was the highest seller, making $662,500. The rest of the major lots failed to sell; the next-highest seller was Newton's Opticks (1704), which made $60,000.

Today's Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts, Including Americana, in 569 lots, made a grand total of $6,608,688. A good chunk of that was from one lot alone, the New Jersey Historical Society's copy of the famously rare Abel Buell map of the United States (1784). The map was estimated at $500,000-700,000, but that proved way too low: the final price was $2,098,500.

A rare copy of the first printed edition of Key's "The Star-Spangled Banner", estimated at $200,000-300,000, also did much better than expected, fetching $506,500. A copy of Hayden and Moran's 1876 color-plate book The Yellowstone National Park ... sold for $218,500, while an inscribed copy of the first printed edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates made $182,500. A first edition of Smith's Wealth of Nations made $122,500, and Lewis and Clark's History of the Expedition ...  (1814) sold for $116,500.

Among the Declarations of Independence up today, the 1833 reprint of Stone's facsimile made $20,000 and an 1846 anastatic reproduction copy sold for $35,000).

The Abraham Lincoln manuscript letter to the Army of the Potomac following the debacle at Fredericksburg failed to sell, as did the first British printing of the Declaration of Independence.

Few writers understood better the limit of their talents than F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In the marvelous new HBO documentary, "Public Speaking," the writer and professional "famous-person" Fran Lebowitz is interviewed by the Nobel-laureate, Toni Morrison. When the subject of the conversation comes to Fitzgerald's work, Lebowitz mentions that his talent pretty much ended with "The Great Gatsby."

Morrison slips in a mention of "The Crack-Up."  Lebowitz ignores the interruption and is already onto her next bon-mot.

Morrison was right to mention "The Crack-Up," as it is perhaps the most honest cri de coeur any writer has ever issued about the panic he felt when his talent had failed him.

Fitzgerald was in Hollywood, struggling with alcoholism and his inability to understand how one wrote a screenplay. He was fairly desperate, because his wife was in a mental institution in Asheville, NC,  and he had a child to support.  The light at the end of the dock was real, and haunting, to him.

How many writers have simply stopped writing? (Eventually, all of them.) We never hear why they stop creatively.

Fitzgerald tried to to continue. "The Last Tycoon" is considered his final work, although it was never finished.

"The Crack-Up" is actually his last great work. He explains, in the most searing self-indictment possible, how he failed - as a writer and a human being.  

He already knew it was time to stop typing.

And yet he beat on ....

Available now on the Bridwell Library site is an audio recording (crystal clear) of Michael Suarez's lecture, "The Codex, the Digital Image, and the Problems of Presence." As Daniel J. Slive, head of special collections at Bridwell, wrote in an email today, "Originally delivered on October 28, 2010 at Southern Methodist University, the lecture considered how digital surrogates are changing the ways we think about books and what the implications of these changes might be. In turn, the lecture asked how books and bibliographical reflection might usefully change the ways we think about 'books' delivered to us as digital images. Insights from art history, philosophy, and anthropology were adduced to enrich our thinking about this timely subject."

Three other lectures are also available, including Mark Dimunation's "Forged in Fire" from last April. Happy Listening!