SHERLOCK HOLMES Collectors take home parts of literary history

The auction included original manuscripts.
LONDON (AP) -- Thousands of personal papers belonging to Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fetched $1.7 million at an auction Wednesday, with many items sold to private U.S. collectors.
Christie's Auction House had expected the archive of letters, notes and handwritten manuscripts to raise more than twice that amount -- around $3.6 million. Of the 135 lots on offer, 31 failed to meet their reserve price and remained unsold.
The highest successful bid for an individual lot was $250,000 for a collection of items including the author's notebooks from his time as a young doctor in Southsea, southern England.
The lot, which was snapped up by a private American buyer, also contained the author's drawing for the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes in the novel "A Study in Scarlet," with the original title of the book, "A Tangled Skein," crossed out. "A Study in Scarlet" was published in 1887.
Over the following 40 years, Conan Doyle published 56 short stories and four novels featuring Holmes and his faithful sidekick, Dr. Watson, who, like Conan Doyle, was a physician, a writer and veteran of the British army.
Personal items
There also was plenty of interest at the auction in Conan Doyle's private life. Letters the author wrote to his brother Innes, which included an acknowledgment that Conan Doyle began a relationship with a woman before the death of his ailing first wife, went for $129,000. The letters were sold to British book dealer Bernard Quaritch Ltd.
Christie's declined to provide details on the unsold lots.
The auction was a great disappointment to scholars who had hoped the papers would be donated to a public institution.
Scholars keen to find out more about Conan Doyle had been frustrated by a family court battle that broke out after the death in 1970 of the author's son Adrian.
As a result, the collection was locked up in a lawyer's office for about 25 years until heirs of the author's daughter-in-law, Anna Conan Doyle, decided upon the Christie's auction.
Sir Christopher Frayling, head of the Arts Council, which allocates government arts funding, this month called the papers "a vast piece of English heritage" that should be kept together for future scholars. "If this was Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, there would be a national outcry," he told BBC Radio.