Sotheby’s has another auction coming up for completely amazing things that I will never be able to afford. This month, on the 17th, 42 original drawings by Ernest Howard Shepard for the four Winnie the Pooh books are on the block including this, perhaps the most iconic Pooh image. The catalogue note reads:

This original illustration is reproduced on page 159 of Winnie-the-Pooh and comprises a full-page illustration in the published volume. It represents one of the iconic images of Winnie-the-Pooh and comes from the final chapter in which Christopher Robin gives a Pooh party, and we say good-bye.

“He nodded and went out …and in a moment I heard Winnie-the-Pooh – bump, bump, bump – going up the stairs behind him.”

Estimated value is between 40,000 and 60,000 GBP. I suppose I’ll just have to settle for the catalogue for $48.00.

‘That sort of Bear’: E.H. Shepard’s Winnie-the-Pooh From the Collections of Stanley J Seeger and Christopher Cone [Sotheby's] : Bibliodyssey

When I first saw one of these things my immediate reaction was, “Sweet! Space-toilets!” It took about 2.5 seconds for me to realize that these would not be the space-toilets that years of sci-fi TV had indoctrinated me to expect. There would be no automatic doors, no spongy material carpeting everything in sight, no toilet to thank me in calm tones for unleashing the wrath of the space-burrito into its glistening, chromed orifice before misting the air with rose perfume.

But I had to look anyway. I mean, come on, how many chances do you get to look inside a space-toilet? And it had just been installed that very day. The varied and vibrant street-life of Seattle couldn’t have caked the insides of the thing with their full palette of horror in less than 12 hours could they?

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Christie’s, the auction house dealing almost exclusively in amazing things that I will never be able to afford, will be offering up a mouthwatering prize for the Victorian-era enthusiast striving for the ultimate in authentic furnishings for their study; namely the desk once owned by Charles Dickens on which he wrote Great Expectations The proceeds of the auction, to be held in June, will be going to the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, which the desk was gifted to by Jeanne–Marie Dickens, Countess Wenckheim. The desk is expected to fetch between £50,000-£80,000, or eight hundred billion American dollars.

Certainly such a price is a trifle when one imagines the value in being able to sit snug in their meticulously reconstructed office, taking nib in hand to inscribe intricately constructed sentences overflowing with poetic prose, running on and on — seemingly forever — a vast torrent of elegant, meandering descriptors, strung together with a delicate chain of commas and semicolons wending their way through a variety of subjects and encompassing the expansive gulf of human emotion in its brilliant and contradictory entirety and in doing so, laying out a map of the societal landscape, a grid work of people’s interactions with other people and the effects of these interpersonal relationships in regards to society especially in terms of the class system which, regardless of how much man has progressed, has yet to be exorcised completely — and indeed in some ways has become even worse — the gully between the wealthy and poor becoming akin to an awesome canyon; a canyon filled with a deep morass of misery and despair from which the destitute can only struggle helplessly glancing upwards on occasion to see the rich, the masters of this brave, new, industrialized world looking down upon them, greedy sneers curling their lips as they watch the less fortunate desperately try to raise themselves up, while only pushing others down further into the muck until they themselves become worn-out, weary, and weak and the next struggling body comes along to begin the whole process again; a twisted and deliberate cycle perpetrated by those on high, licking their lips at the spectacle laid out before them, a spectacle from which only they reap the rewards but at the cost of their eternal souls.

A small price to pay indeed.

Press Release [Christie's] : The Victorian Peeper