Last Spring Sotheby’s auction house sold off a copy of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale for 130,000 USD. The special edition wasn’t an original manuscript. It didn’t even come with the author’s autograph. But it had a different unique feature. This version of the book was “unburnable” – handcrafted with fireproof materials.
The auction of this single fireproof edition was a clever fundraiser for PEN America to “raise awareness about the proliferating book banning and educational gag orders in American schools nationwide…” As the online auction page noted, the primary targets of these measures have been works
