Heritage sells a copy of Sylvia Plath's A Winter Ship (1960)

Heritage Auctions has sold a copy of Sylvia Plath's A Winter Ship (Tragara Press, 1960). This just 8 days following Bonhams selling one. But there is a difference.

While the Bonhams copy was a 25th originating from Plath and her Estate, Heritage sold one of the 22 copies from the very large lot (Lot 141) of copies that sold at Bonhams last June. That sentence is confusing! The winner of that big June lot appears to be Nate D Sanders. In addition to selling this one via Heritage, he is offering two copies on eBay for $15,000 each. Copy 1 is here and Copy 2 is here. Sanders formerly had a copy of the publication on his website for $6,000. Sanders was active in the 2018 Bonhams auction, too.

Lot 45118 of the Heritage Auction, which closed yesterday, the 9th, sold for $3,750 (including buyer's premium). The wrappers for all these copies have different marbled patterns, which makes each one in its own way a rather unique item. There appear to have been a total of twenty-five made by Alan Anderson of the Tragara Press.

The individual copies sold at the recent auctions have only gone up in price. The single copy in June sold for £1,402 ($1,850 by today's exchange rate). The Bonhams copy sold on 1 December went for Sold for £2,167 (US$ 2,859 by today's exchange rate). And Heritage sold, as mentioned above, for $3,750. This is a record for this particular state of the edition.

You can see this copy visible in the Bonhams auction image of all twenty-two copies. It appears on the bottom row, second from the left. And the copies available on eBay at the moment appears to be as follows: Copy 1 is in the top row, fourth from the right, and Copy 2 is on the bottom row, all the way to the right.

All links accessed 9 December 2021.

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

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 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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