Unpublished letters and scripts belonging to leading figures of the film and theatre world can be worth thousands of pounds.
For instance, 11 letters by film director Stanley Kubrick (19281999) are expected to fetch £14,000 to £18,000 sterling (€22,000 to €28,000) at a Sotheby's auction in London next Thursday.
At the same auction, a series of draft film scripts for his 1964 masterpiece Dr Strangelove, described as the black comedy of nuclear warfare, is estimated at £5,000 to £7,000. A certificate of nomination for award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the same film carries a guide price of £2,000 to £3,000.
The idea for the film was based on Peter George's novel - written under the pseudonym Peter Bryant - Red Alert, published in Britain in 1958 under the title Two Hours to Doom.
Kubrick liked the book and invited George to collaborate on the screenplay. The letters from Kubrick to George dealing with the various scripts are expected to fetch up to £18,000.
George's copies of Bafta awards certificates for Dr Strangelove are estimated at £1,000 to £1,500, while tickets and memorabilia relating to the world premiere of the film are expected to go for a similar sum.
Meanwhile, a group of some 250 letters and cards by Sir Laurence Olivier (1907-1989) and his family in the same auction is expected to fetch between £50,000 and £60,000.
For people interested in glimpsing verbal snapshots of the private lives of famous people, a letter to Tarquin, his son, shows Olivier admitting that he had "made rather a mess of a good many things". He writes that he is "terribly sorry you should read our news in the papers . . . I mean about Vivien and me having a baby . . . I have been rather funking talking to you about it".
According to Mr Peter Selley, a specialist in the books department at Sotheby's, the Kubrick material is valuable in part because he was "a great recluse and any material relating to him is very, very thin on the ground".
And what are the chances of a reader unearthing documents of a similar calibre? "It would be extremely unlikely that anyone would have material of this kind unless they were related to a film actor or a film director. I mean this is not the sort of material that turns up in attics. Sometimes things do lie undisturbed for hundreds of years and people buy houses or inherit them but that is rare," he says.
Kubrick and Olivier are special cases, he says. "Material relating to films and plays traditionally hasn't had a huge amount of value unless they are great icons of our time." According to Ian Whyte of Whyte's auctioneers in Marlborough Street, Dublin, high-value material of this sort rarely turns up in Ireland. "Very little comes through our hands," he says.
However, some years ago unpublished letters by Fred Astaire written to a friend of Astaire's in Ireland did go under the hammer. It included a hand-written telegram to Frank Sinatra on the death of Sinatra's mother which, says Mr Whyte, "made a couple of hundred pounds - nothing special".
As for theatre-related documents, they "don't go for big money here". Irish theatre is quite "neglected in collecting", although letters from George Bernard Shaw can fetch from £200 to £2,000, depending on the letter, he says.
"Once an actor goes out of memory, the value tends to drop," he says, adding that he sees more material than gets to auction. People may seek valuations, discover an item is worth, say, £500 and decide to keep it whereas they might sell it if it was worth £5,000. jmarms@irish-times.ie
