A recent auction of Rabindranath Tagore's letters for Rs5.9 crore shines the spotlight on the significance of preserving personal correspondence and documents
Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore dictates to his secretary at Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, West Bengal, in 1929 Image : E.O.Hoppe/Getty Images
“It is a fine ship but I shall await my journey's end before I pass judgment on her.”
Prophetic as this statement might seem, written by Archibald Gracie onboard the Titanic on April 10, 1912, in reality it was just a four-page letter from a teenager to his friend while he sailed from England to the US. A few days later, in the early hours of April 15, the ship—it was on its maiden journey from Southampton in England to New York City in the US with about 2,224 people on board—sank in the Atlantic Ocean, killing an estimated 1,500 people. Gracie was one of the survivors.
This April, roughly 113 years later, Gracie’s letter sold at an auction in England for £30,000, a record price for any correspondence from the Titanic. Auctioneer Henry Aldridge and Son described it as “a truly exceptional, museum-grade piece”; letters from Titanic survivors are extremely rare, and this one had never been on the market before.
Gracie’s letter is one among many famous ones around the world that have gone under the hammer this year alone: A letter from Mary Queen of Scots and her husband Lord Darn from the 16th century sold for £15,000 at an auction by Lyon and Turnbull in Edinburgh; a letter from Albert Einstein penned in 1952 titled ‘On my participation in the atom bomb project’ was put up for auction by Bonhams in June; John Lennon’s letter to his future wife Cynthia Powell in 1962 is being auctioned by Christie’s for an estimated £30,000 to £40,000 on July 9; a letter by Steve Jobs, written in 1974, expressing his wish to attend the Kumbh Mela, was auctioned for $500,312 this January by Bonhams.