A collection of T. S. Eliot’s unpublished correspondence with members of the Faber publishing family was recently sold at a London auction for $436,725. The collection included a set of 50 letters addressed to Tom Faber, the son of publisher Geoffrey Faber (and Eliot’s godson), which sold for $82,300. The letters featured poems and illustrations later used as a basis for Eliot’s book Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
Also included in the sale were a set of 84 letters written from Eliot to Geoffrey’s wife Enid Faber, which sold for $99,620, and a copy of the The Waste Land, printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in an edition of 460 copies, inscribed by Eliot to Geoffrey Farber. It sold for $58,500.
