What’s It Worth?: Selling Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the Twentieth Century

This article examines the selling of manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales in the twentieth century. It concludes that these manuscripts never achieved any high degree of commercial success and examines the factors that seem to have contributed to that inability to attract high prices. It also contrasts the relative failure of manuscripts of Chaucer’s work to achieve substantial prices in the marketplace with the much higher prices that were paid at auction in the same period for copies of Caxton’s printed editions of his poem.