The Bookish Side of Rollling Stone Charlie Watts
Charlie Watts at home in 1966. Photo: © Gered Mankowitz / Iconic Images. Reprinted from Christie’s Online Magazine 359.
Charlie Watts is best known for keeping the beat for the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band. Now Christie’s has burnished his reputation bibliophile with a very successful September 28-29 auction of more than 200 of the dapper drummer’s rare books. The collection ranged from first editions of classic literature to rare jazz titles, demonstrating erudition and s. One highlight, a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, sold for more than a quarter million dollars.
Watts died on August 24, 2021, at the age of 80, after drumming for the Stones for 58 years, from 1963 until his death. Like the timeless works on the rhythm man’s library shelves, his work is classic and will live on.literature,
The auction netted more than $3.35 million. Watts, like so many others, loved crime fiction. Included in his collection was an “exceptionally rare” edition of Agatha Christie’s The Thirteen Problems, which netted $63,968, a new record for the author. A a signed first edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles that hammered at the $226,555 was an auction high “for a printed book by the renowned Sherlock Holmes creator,” according to MSNBC.
Watts reportedly had first editions of everything Jeeves creator P.G. Wodehouse wrote as well as almost every book by Evelyn Waugh. “Strands of a specifically English genius run through the authors that he favored most: the wit and wordsmithery of Wodehouse; the steely common sense of George Orwell; Graham Greene’s gift for ambiguity and uncertainty; Waugh’s prickly class-awareness,” says Christie’s Books and Manuscripts specialist Mark Wiltshire, who has catalogued Watts’s books ahead of their sale, in an article in Christie’s Online Magazine No. 359.
Christie’s Online likens the detective novels to “ensemble pieces” that produced a result that is “very rare in imaginative writing, but almost universal in rock music and jazz,” with “writers acting like musicians, working collaboratively to create a satisfying and harmonious end product.”
For Watts, a graphic design student at Harrow Art School before joining the Stones, the design of the dust-jackets held an allure all their own. The fact that many of Watt’s books had intact original covers makes them more desirable as collectors’ items “and doubly intriguing as art objects,” Christie’s Online writes.
Overall, the auction was a success, with all of the books selling for well above their estimated prices. Proceeds from the sale will go to the Charlie Watts Foundation, a charitable venture established after his death to support causes dear to him, including music education, arts and culture, health and wellness and animal welfare.