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.