Modern physics drew nearly $1.8 million at an auction on 4 October. “It was a groundbreaking sale,” says Francis Wahlgren, head of the books and manuscripts department at Christie’s auction house in New York City. “We’ve handled Einstein before, but never within the whole context of how he fits into the works of other physicists.”

The sale’s top draw was an autograph manuscript from 1913–14, with some 50 pages of calculations by Albert Einstein and Michele Besso, in which they checked whether an early version of the general theory of relativity could account for a tiny discrepancy between predictions and observations of Mercury’s motion. (It couldn’t.) The Einstein–Besso manuscript went to a European dealer for $559 500. One of the few items predating the late 19th century, a fragment of an autograph manuscript by Isaac Newton—some 90 words that he added to the second edition of Optiks—brought in the...

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