Beat poets’ papers fetch $225,000

An auction of first-edition books, handwritten manuscripts and letters by Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski raised $225,000 in San Francisco to benefit a publisher left homeless by Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans resident Edwin Blair, 69, said Thursday he reluctantly agreed to auction the items he had been collecting for 40 years as a way to help his friends, Gypsy Lou Webb and her husband, Jon, who published some of Bukowski’s earliest works.

One of the auction’s rarest items, an autographed 1960 first pressing of Bukowski’s “Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail,” sold for $9,775, the highest bid of the day.