Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Sibylline Leaves to auction in December

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's own copy of Sybilline Leaves, his most famous collection of poems, will be offered in a sale of books and manuscripts at Christie's.

It's expected to sell for $70,000-100,000 in the December 8 sale in New York.

Coleridge poems Christies
The lot includes notes in Coleridge's own hand

The book was published in 1817 and features all of Coleridge's poems from 1793 onwards, including a revised version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

This version includes handwritten marginalia from Coleridge himself, offering an insight into his thoughts on the edition.

These mainly consist of indignant and entertaining rants against his printer: "This leaf [pp.125-126] the Publisher's had promised to cancel, together with 3 or 4 others made ludicrous by blunders of the press, and still worse by the presumptuous ignorance and coxcombry of the Bristol Printer, who perpetrates verses himself, forsooth!"

Elsewhere he writes: "This… I had earnestly charged the printer to omit, but he was a coxcomb… the Devil damn him (i.e. his own Devil)".

A letter sent from Abraham Lincoln to Henry J Raymond (then editor of the New York Times) in 1864 concerning the Niagara Affair - a political gambit orchestrated by the editor of the New York Tribune that failed to embarrass the president.

 He provides Raymond with the correspondence between himself and the Tribune to set the record straight.

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