Sylvia Plath: The price is up!

In a recent ABEbooks.com search, I looked at all books by Sylvia Plath and sorted the results by highest price. The copy for sale of the Heinemann edition of The Colossus and other poems, for sale by James Jaffe, recently rose from $50,000 to $65,000. A full description of this fine, rare collectible is here.

Not only is the first Heinemann edition of The Colossus highly collectible, but this one is signed by Plath and was given to another highly regarded, famous poet, Theodore Roethke. What makes this book even more valuable is the fact that it is an "association copy". According to the Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA), a association copy is "A book once belonging to the author, or signed or annotated by the author to someone closely associated with the author of the book or the book itself in some way. Also, a book inscribed by its author to a famous person, or owned by someone of interest."

The price of a book can go up for any number of reasons. Plath, if you will, had a great 2007, which saw a number of books published as well as the Symposium that took place in Oxford in late October. Plath titles remaing collectible, but I am unsure whether or not it is a necessarily competitive market. Prices, however, rarely go down, as is evidenced by the $15,000 jump in the Jaffe Colossus.

One of the only other association copies of The Colossus was Ted Hughes's copy, also signed by Plath. The bookseller Rick Gekoski handled this book and wrote about it in his book Nabokov's Butterfly. (In the UK, this book was published as Tolkien's Gown.) Plath's signature on anything is exceedingly scarce, which is not too surprising given her early departure.

Please note: The image attached to this posting is not the Jaffe book.

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de...

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...

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