Sold for £650,000 at Christie’s (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) on December 13 was a “long-lost” 1861 edition of On the origin of Species… whose pages Darwin used to make autograph revisions to be sent to his German translator, HG Bronn, and incorporated into a planned second German edition.
The majority of those revisions were then incorporated into the fourth English and all subsequent editions to create what is regarded as the definitive text. The rediscovery of this annotated copy allows for the first time a precise reading of Darwin’s exact revisions, “without the veil of reconstruction and translation”.