An autographed manuscript from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. An unpublished verse penned by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. An editor’s copy of Phillis Wheatley Peters’ Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. These were just a few of the literary treasures in former Republican Vermont gubernatorial candidate Bruce Lisman’s book collection.
The Bruce M. Lisman Collection of Important American Literature was sold at Christie’s auction house in New York City earlier this month. Through a live auction on June 15 and an online auction which took place from June 2 to 16, the sale closed for a total of $3,158,568.
Lisman is a Burlington-born University of Vermont graduate who credits his father, a high school teacher, with inspiring his bibliophilic tendencies. After amassing a net worth of $50 million on Wall Street, Lisman returned to Vermont in 2009 and settled in Shelburne.
In 2016, he ran for governor on a platform of reduced state spending and economic growth. Lisman lost the Republican nomination to Phil Scott, who went on to win the general election and has held the office since.
According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, in 1988, Lisman — then cohead of global equities at Bear Stearns — wandered into a New York book fair, a serendipitous encounter which piqued his interest in collecting. Over the next three decades, he began to accumulate rare volumes, manuscripts and literary ephemera.
Lisman’s hobby eventually brought him into possession of treasures touched by the most prominent American writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. In addition to Wheatley Peters, Longfellow and Whitman, Lisman’s collection also included work by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Washington Irving and Herman Melville.
“His collection was the finest collection of American literature to come to auction in a generation,” said Heather Weintraub, a vice president and specialist in the Books & Manuscripts department at Christie’s, in an interview with Seven Days.
Most significant, perhaps, was Lisman’s body of work by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the 19th century novelist best known for penning the high school syllabus evergreen The Scarlet Letter. According to Weintraub, Lisman’s was the largest privately owned collection of Hawthorne’s work. In Lisman’s Hawthorne assemblage: a multitude of letters, inscribed manuscripts and leafs from personal notebooks, as well as a signed linen bag (hammer price: $3,780).
Hawthorne and the other 19th century literary behemoths were considered to be “Part One” of Lisman’s collection and were sold by live auction. Part Two, sold online, featured more than 150 pieces from the 18th century and Federal period — what an overview on the Christie’s website calls “the first fruits of American cultural life.” This corpus included early contributions by female writers who have fallen into obscurity — among them Ann Eliza Bleecker, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster, Catharine Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, and Leonora Sansay.
Weintraub shared that from the auction house’s point of view, the sale was a success. “We saw strength in a variety of authors,” she said.
Some of the biggest-ticket items went for six-figure values. A copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque with an inscription written by Poe to his cousin fetched $441,000. A letter Mark Twain sent to his father-in-law went for $151,000. And a copy of the 1850s periodical The National Era, in which Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared, sold for $126,000, well above its estimated ceiling value of $40,000.
One of the most anticipated lots of the auction, however, did not immediately sell — the original proofs for The Scarlet Letter, which Christie’s called “the crown jewel” of the collection. Valued at $600,000 to $800,000, the proofs did not sell at auction but were snatched up immediately after sale for $693,000 by Stuart Rose, a bibliophile and philanthropist.
The high hammer prices at Lisman’s auction evinced today’s strong rare-books market. In recent years, Weintraub said, “there’s a particular appetite for the top of the market, the best of the best.”
Perhaps this explains why Lisman, who declined to speak with Seven Days, chose to auction off his collection now, rather than holding onto it and bequeathing it to relatives, as some do — or leaving his books up for grabs as a more modest collector did in Strafford earlier this week.
Other factors compelling Lisman to sell now may have been the preparation of his estate, and, as Lisman indicated in the Wall Street Journal, a feeling that his collection was complete.
Weintraub said Lisman’s sale “follows in the tradition of the great American literature collections ahead of him.”
On behalf of Christie’s, she added: “We have been extremely honored to handle his books.”
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