Dracula manuscript auction fails to come to life
Bram Stoker's long-lost original manuscript of Dracula has failed to sell at auction after bids fell short of its reserve price.
The 529-page typescript had been expected to go under the hammer for about £1 million in Christie's in New York.
Despite huge media interest, buyers failed to match an undisclosed minimum reserve price. Christie's said it was "disappointed" by the result.
The heavily amended manuscript, which bears the author's original handwritten title "The Un-Dead", was being sold by a US collector who bought it in 1984.
The document reveals that Stoker planned a different ending, a graphic description of the destruction of Castle Dracula in a volcanic eruption.
The novel was published in 1897, but the script was not found until 1980 when it turned up in Massachusetts.
Dublin-born Stoker moved to London in 1877 and began writing Dracula in 1890, possibly inspired by a nightmare mentioned in his notebooks which are kept in the Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia.
The author derived material from the Legends of the Wallachian Prince Vlad the Impaler, Faust and early vampire stories. He wrote it at his home in Chelsea, west London, and Cruden Bay, Scotland.
Only days before publication, the title was simplified to the name of its main character, the blood-sucking Transylvanian count who swapped his remote ancestral castle to stalk the streets of gas-lit London.
The first edition had a print run of 3,000 priced at six shillings (30p) each, with Stoker receiving a royalty of one and sixpence (7.5p) per copy after the first 1,000 were sold. The novel has since been translated into 44 languages and sold millions of copies around the world. Dracula has also become the most filmed character after Sherlock Holmes.
