"Always look in drawers"

In the recently published account of John Gilkey, Allison Bartlett’s The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, which is set to become a classic of its kind, a dealer recounts viewing an auction in London and finding in a bureau drawer a copy of Blake’s Book of Job in which had been tucked his even rarer Song of Liberty. The bureau was estimated at about $2,000, the Job was worth at least $100,000. Obviously rejecting the Gilkey option of trousering the book and walking out of the room with it, the dealer, oddly, decided not to bid for the chest either. He doesn’t say why, but he may have reasoned that someone else had noticed the book and had decided to bid, prompting a bidding war. Or, perhaps someone had opted to steal the book at some point, in which case our friend would need to keep his eyes on the chest almost up to the point of sale. As it was, the dealer informed the auction house of the hidden treasure before the chest was sold. The four-page Song of Liberty was duly removed and later fetched $25,000 at auction. We are not told what happened to the Job.

Re the Tamerlane pamphlet above -

One of the rarest first editions in American literature, Tamerlane and Other Poems , a forty page pamphlet published pseudonymously at his own expense in 1827 by the 17 year old Edgar Allan Poe, was found in a box of agricultural pamphlets in a New Hampshire antiques barn in 1988 by a lucky dealer who recognised its worth and secured it for $15.  Only a dozen copies are said to exist. This one sold not long afterwards at Sotheby’s for $198,000.