An autograph manuscript for Walt Whitman's The Voice of the Rain has realised $52,500 at Bonhams New York.
The lot beat its $50,000 by 5% in the September 22 Fine Books and Manuscripts sale.
 The Voice of the Rain was included in Whitman's Leaves of Grass |
It's written in the poet's own hand and displays various corrections and deviations from the final text, including the title - which was originally "A Rain Enigma".
An inscription accompanying the work reads: "To Wayland Hyatt Smith / with both hands / Horace Traubel / November / 1895."
Traubel wrote Walt Whitman in Camden, an exhaustive biography of the poet's final years spread across several volumes and 2.5m words.
He also founded the Walt Whitman Fellowship International.
A broadside printed in New Orleans in 1769, limiting any increase in the city's bars, cabarets and pool halls, sold for $35,000 - up 133.3% on a $15,000 estimate.
Alejandro O'Reilly, who took on the role of viceroy in the region after it passed into Spanish hands, was responsible for issuing the edict.
McMurtie pointed out in a history of the city that it "tends to show that New Orleans has not changed so much in three half-centuries, [and] points out that one of the principal causes of disorder in the city is the large number of inns, billiard halls, and cabarets then in operation."
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