Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” Writing desk is estimated to fetch up to $80k
by Luxury.Net
Abraham “Bram” Stoker was an Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned. Before writing Dracula, Stoker spent several years researching European folklore and mythological stories of vampires. Dracula is an epistolary novel, written as a collection of realistic, but completely fictional, diary entries, telegrams, letters, ship’s logs, and newspaper clippings, all of which added a level of detailed realism to his story, a skill he developed as a newspaper writer.
The desk where Bram Stoker whose life was also shrouded with mystery as much like his immortal creation Dracula, wrote his famed novel is up for grabs. Having been restored and transformed into work of art, the desk which has had a long history, and over the past century was left battered, with missing drawers and legs chopped short, will be auctioned by auctioneer Profiles in History, as part of its Hollywood Auction on 15 -16 December, where rare James Bond posters are also up for grabs.
Irish writer Stoker created the vampire character in the late 1890s and then gave his desk to a friend, who was the editor of the Yorkshire Post newspaper. The table stayed in the Phillips family for decades, but it was not looked after — drawers went missing and the legs were sawed short. But in recent years, the owner commissioned furniture artist Mark Brazier-Jones to preserve and enhance the cultural artifact as a work of art.
This perfect gift might be too late for your Halloween shopping list, but you can snap it up just in time for Christmas for the beloved Twi-Hard or diehard Goth in your life. The very same desk that Bram Stoker sat at to pen his bloody 1897 masterpiece “Dracula” is up for auction next month. The desk has had some improvements since Stoker scratched his head over the Count, including some fetching embroidered bats, rose buds and thorns, and a “savage hound.” The two secret compartments of the desk are now lined with leather and it comes with a matching candelabra, so you can feel justified in shelling out the estimated auction price of $60,000 to $80,000.
