Sherlock Holmes Auction Big Success

American bidders pushed up prices Monday at an auction of Sherlock Holmes memorabilia.

The collection of the late British Holmes expert, Stanley MacKenzie, sold for nearly $236,000 at Sotheby’s. That figure was nearly double pre-auction estimates.

An anonymous collector from Chicago paid $33,100 for an original 1887 copy of Beeton’s Christmas Annual, in which Holmes made his debut in “A Study in Scarlet.”

Otto Penzler, a book dealer from New York, spent more than $64,000 on a dozen lots, including 688 issues of The Strand magazine in which many of the Holmes stories were first published.