?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
"THE IDEA TO PUT THE NEW TESTAMENT BEFORE THE OLD IS VERY GOOD" TOLSTOY, LEO. Autograph Letter Signed, in English, to inventor John Kemp Starley, thanking for sending books and expressing approval of the idea of changing the order of the Testaments in the Bible. Written in the blank space below a letter written to Starley by P[avel Alexandrovich] Boulanger on behalf of Tolstoy conveying similar content. 1 1/2 pages, 8vo, written on the first and forth pages of a single folded sheet; mounted to cardboard trimmed to size, loss to few words of Tolstoy's text at lower edge of first page, moderate scattered foxing and offsetting, closed separations at folds. [Moscow], circa 30 January 1901
"I was not well . . . Now I am better and am very glad to be able to add a few words with my thanks for your books. "They are both very nice and the idea to put the new testament before the old is very good." Boulanger's letter: ". . . Count Leo Tolstoy is unwell and asked me to . . . thank you for . . . your . . . Bible and excellent copy of New Testament . . . and to tell you that he quite agrees with your good idea of putting in a proper order [the] so called Holy Bible." Pavel Alexandrovich Boulanger (1865-1925) was an official of the Moscow-Kursk Railway and friend of Tolstoy, who helped arrange transport to the Crimea in the summer of 1901, where Tolstoy was ordered by his doctor to convalesce from an illness.
