When members of the local historical society in Berwick, Pa., found a dusty, long-ignored copy of Benjamin Franklin's 18th-century "Poor Richard" almanac on their shelves a few months ago, they decided to find out whether it could be real.
The answer was yes — emphatically confirmed on Tuesday at the Sotheby's auction house, where an anonymous bidder paid $556,500 for the 1733 edition, the second-highest price ever for a book printed in America.
That was big news in Berwick, an old manufacturing city of 10,000 residents about 95 miles northwest of Philadelphia, where Franklin, using the pseudonym Richard Saunders, printed thousands of copies of his almanac between 1733 and 1760, dispensing advice and aphorisms along with "lunations, eclipses, judgment of the weather" and other data relevant to the 40-degree latitude "from Newfoundland to South Carolina."
The celebration for historical society members began on the 150-mile trip home from New York.
"We're on the second bottle of champagne," historical society president Thomas McLaughlin said when reached on his cell phone aboard the bus taking 14 society members back to Berwick.
McLaughlin said that when the society inquired of experts about the almanac's value, the first estimate was $7,000 to $10,000, but it rose sharply after the Library Company of Philadelphia, which Franklin founded, determined the book not only was real but also was one of only three 1733 copies known to exist.
The experts said it was authentic based on the original binding, the ink and the printing, but even then the presale estimate was only $100,000 to $150,000.
Selby Kiffer, an authority on historical American documents who examined the almanac for Sotheby's, said it "had that right look."
"It's like finding a fossil in its matrix," Kiffer said. "It's a cliche to say something is once in a lifetime until you have an opportunity like this."
Five bidders participated in the sale, one in the room and four by phone. Sotheby's said they included private and institutional collectors.
McLaughlin said it would be "a massive understatement" to say he was surprised by the almanac's final price — which Sotheby's said was exceeded only by the $1.4 million paid for George Washington's copy of the Federalist Papers in 1990.
McLaughlin said the financial windfall would go to the Berwick Historical Society's endowment fund, with some money already earmarked for renovating the town's 1860s-era city hall and acquiring a World War II-vintage Stuart light tank, 15,224 of which were produced by a local foundry during the conflict.