John Steinbeck’s Private Letters to Jackie Kennedy Up for Auction

(Bloomberg) -- The point of anything deemed “collectible”—a baseball card, a stamp, an autograph—is that its value is based on set criteria dictated by the marketplace. Without consensus about what those values are, baseball cards are just laminated paper, and stamps are just, well, also laminated paper.

“It’s simple supply and demand,” says Judith Lowry, a partner at New York’s Argosy Book Store, which also deals in correspondence, autographs, and memorabilia. “If there are more people who want something than there are copies or letters, the price goes up.”

In the case of a treasure trove of letters, manuscripts, and diaries by author John Steinbeck about to come to auction, there’s an added calculus: topicality.

“There’s an autographed manuscript where he talks about America, and ethical conduct and public servants,” says Elyse Luray, a specialist at Heritage Auctions who organized the Oct. 24 sale. “And right now [in the U.S.] there’s talk of impeachment.” Steinbeck’s letters, she continues, even have echoes of the opioid crisis. “He goes to Europe and sees everyone taking sleeping pills, and here we are having issues with a different kind of pill.”

Luray says that relevance should make the lots easier to sell. “They give you an inside view into the things that John was experiencing, and they’re apropos of what’s going on today.”

Background and Prices

The collection belonged to Steinbeck’s third wife, Elaine. When she died in 2003, “they took everything—sheets, wrapping paper—and put it all in storage,” Luray says. “There was also some stuff in a safety deposit box.” 

Eventually, Elaine’s daughter and grandson managed to go through it all and contacted Heritage about a potential sale. “I can’t tell you how many people they showed [the material to] before me,” she says, “but I’ve been in the memorabilia business for many years, and I’d never heard of Steinbeck’s warmup journal. And it’s my bet that not many people knew of it either.”

The auction is online-only, and none of the lots carry estimates, just starting bids.

The “warmup journal,” which Steinbeck wrote in from 1946-47 “in the same way that a football player warms up before a game,” Luray says, is easily the most expensive, with a starting bid of $10,000. With the buyer’s premium and fees, that number goes up to $12,500.

The journal, which Steinbeck describes as “one of those interminable notebooks that serves no purpose but to warm me up and sometimes to cool me down,” includes about 100 pages of his handwriting. Aside from writing exercises, there’s a surprising amount of angst on the page.

“The high point of my life is passed and now I can only go downhill,” he writes. “The sadness that creeps in on me has always been in me. It isn’t hard on any physical thing nor can I find a mental basis for it. But the unwanted sadness is overwhelming.”

Kennedy Correspondence

Other correspondence, particularly between Steinbeck and John and Jackie Kennedy, are particularly sought-after, Luray says. 

“Certain things have intrinsic value,” she explains. “His autograph is worth something. Jackie O’s handwriting is worth something. The fact that some of the Kennedy letters are on White House stationery is worth something. And then the subject matter is important, and the provenance is important.”

The real key, says Argosy’s Lowry, is that the correspondence itself should be interesting.

“Letters are important depending on the content,” she says. “Everyone writes letters—‘Thanks for the invitation, but I can’t come speak at your organization’—and that’s valuable for the signature.” (For context, Argosy has a few letters written by Steinbeck in Moscow that range from $1,500 to $2,000.)

Just a Steinbeck signature, she continues, is worth a few hundred dollars. “But real collectors want a letter, and a letter that says something. Maybe one that reveals something you never knew.”

If that’s the case, the correspondence between Jackie Kennedy and Steinbeck after JFK’s assassination could prove particularly valuable, if not to Steinbeck collectors, then at least to Kennedy fans.

JFK Assassination

Luray says Jackie’s letters to Steinbeck contain a tacit request for the author to write JFK’s biography. They also include some explicitly personal asides.

“I wonder if he foresaw his end. He often spoke in a light way about being assassinated,” Kennedy writes in a six-page letter to Steinbeck on March 22, 1964, four months after her husband was killed. “I was never scared—because I could not conceive of anything like that happening to Jack—and he was so wry about it. Now I wonder if he thought deep down that it might happen to him.”

(Lowry points out that “of course he didn’t [write the biography], which makes it all even more interesting.”)

Accessible to the World

That letter has the comparatively modest starting bid of $1,875.

While auction houses often lowball opening bids to entice buyers, Luray says “the family wanted [the auction] to be accessible. Usually when you work with estates, people say, ‘I’m not selling unless I get X.’ But they came in and said we want this to be accessible to the world. So even though I think the manuscript for Tortilla Flats is worth more, we set a very reasonable opening bid.”

Other pieces of ephemera from Steinbeck’s estate include an inkwell (starting bid: $185), a silver-plated wine cooler ($250), and a bronze bust ($525), which have a more tenuous connection to history. Those “don’t have a lot of intrinsic value,” Luray says, “so they have value only because they’re coming from the estate.”

The real point is that the world is still interested in Steinbeck.

“Some writers have their ups and downs,” she says. “But Steinbeck is consistently collected.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Justin Ocean at jocean1@bloomberg.net

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