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$170,000 Paid for 8 Leaves from Gutenberg Bible

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Eight leaves from a Gutenberg Bible sold Tuesday for $170,000--about three times more than expected--in lively bidding on the second day of a four-day auction at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo.

The pages, removed from a Gutenberg Bible that was broken up in the 1940s, contain the entire Letter to the Romans by the Apostle Paul. The presale estimate on the leaves was $50,000 to $75,000, said Chris Coover, a manuscript specialist with Christie’s, the auction house conducting the sales.

The winning bid was by New York rare book dealer H.P. Kraus, who beat out a private buyer from London and two dealers from San Francisco and Southern California.

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“The bidding was spirited . . . you could even say heated,” Coover said.

In all, sales from the Estelle Doheny collection amounted to $1.06 million on Tuesday and a total of $2.76 million for the first two days, including the 10% auctioneer’s commission.

Once housed at the Roman Catholic seminary, the collection is being auctioned by the Los Angeles Archdiocese to build an endowment fund for the education of future priests.

A complete Volume I of the Gutenberg Bible, printed in 1455, was sold for $5.3 million in the first Doheny auction last October in New York. The rare Gutenberg Bibles were divided into two volumes, the first extending from Genesis through Psalms.

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Among other items sold Tuesday was a Bret Harte manuscript, “How I Went to the Mines,” for $18,000 to Heritage Book Shop in Los Angeles. Containing an autobiographical story that dealt with the writer’s early career in the California Gold Rush, the nine-page manuscript was written in 1897 and was published in a collection of Harte’s stories in 1900.

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