The Charleston (S.C.) Library Society claims it is the rightful owner of a 1776 issue of a local newspaper that sold for $140,000 at a May 19 auction at Christie’s in New York. The purchaser, the Charleston Post and Courier Foundation, has put the transaction on hold until ownership can be verified. The August 2–14 issue of the South Carolina and American General Gazette contains the only text of the Declaration of Independence printed in the state at the time.
The library had no idea the paper might have come from its collection until Terry Lipscomb, an independent researcher at the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, pointed out that historian Lyman Draper had consulted that very issue there in 1871. The society’s librarian, Catherine E. Sadler, told American Libraries that the copy was not there in the 1950s when her predecessor had the newspaper collection microfilmed.
According to the July 1 Post and Courier, the pattern of stains on the auctioned copy appears similar to patterns on previous and subsequent issues in the collection.
Posted July 10, 2000.