Last month I posted about the sale of Howard Carter's papers at Bonham's (where full details of the lot are detailed) and only yesterday I was on the Bonham's website puzzling over why the lot simply wasn't showing on the list of items sold at that auction. This story on the Daily Mail website explains all:
Geordie is a great-grandson of the 5th Earl who died from blood poisoning after a mosquito bite following his funding of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings in 1922.
Geordie, 52, was at Bonhams auction house in New Bond Street for the sale of rare letters and pictures from his forbear.
The £2,000 estimate was well within Geordie's budget, but he and other bidders were astonished to see the price soar to £12,600 before being sold to a casually-dressed Frenchman.
Afterwards, however, the purchaser said he had made a mistake. He bid by accident, thinking he had secured the previous lot, a photograph of a Constantine gate, with an estimate of £500. Says Eton and Oxford-educated Geordie, who is opening an exhibition next month at Highclere dedicated to Tutankhamun: 'I couldn't understand what was going on.
'I was prepared to go as high as £4,000, but I never got the chance as it soon went past my limit. Then it turns out the chap who bid for it hadn't wanted it after all' . . . .
Bonham's has agreed to place the items in next month's sale where Carnarvon will bid again.
See the above page for the full story. I'll check the sale results when the auction results are published.
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