Leonard Cohen's Love Letters Sell For More Than C$1M

By External Source

A collection of more than 50 love letters written by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen to the woman who inspired So Long, Marianne has sold at auction for US$876,000 ( C$1,167,953.28).

The archive of letters from Cohen to Marianne Ihlen chronicles their 1960s love affair and the blossoming of Cohen's career from struggling poet to famous musician.

The top letter, in which Cohen wrote in December 1960 about being "alone with the vast dictionaries of language," fetched almost $75,000 compared to an original high estimate of $13,000.

This isn’t the first time a Canadian music icon has posthumously generated enormous interest at the auction block.

Last year, an anonymous buyer paid $125,000 for Glenn Gould’s annotated score from the 1981 recording of J. S. Bach’s The Goldberg Variations, according to the seller, Bonhams Auction House. To date it is a record for a Gould manuscript.

-- Reuters Thomson, Bonhams Auction House