On Monday and Tuesday, Sotheby’s in London held an auction for English PEN of books by well-known authors, with annotations by the authors. The organiser of the auction, book dealer Rick Gekoski, describes what many of them did. I did think of attending the auction myself but realised the prices would be way out of my range, as turned out to be the case. Most of the headlines were about some book about some boy magician. (This is going to sound horribly pretentious but I have only read the first of the boy magician books and then in Irish. Why in Irish? When I was learning Irish (one day I will review a book only available in Irish on my website), my extraordinarily bright daughter gave me a copy of the book in Irish to help with my learning.) The results of the auction show that that book sold for £150,000 but I would have been more interested in Remains of the Day, which sold for a mere £18,000 or Wolf Hall at £16,000 or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at £13,000 or Amsterdam at £7000 or Oscar and Lucinda at £4,8000 or Last Orders at £3200. You can support English Pen by joining here and learn more about them here. They do lots of good work helping writers all over the world.