The (London) Times Literary Supplement of  July 11 reports that a copy of the very scarce VN novel Camera Obscura  published by John Lane in 1936 in Winifred Roy’s translation from the French translation is again up for auction at Southby’s.  Only three copies with dust jackets are known to exist. Nabokov (whose name appears as Nabokoff-Sirin on the cover) was unhappy with the Roy translation and, in any event, most of the edition  was destroyed in a warehouse hit by a German bomb in WWII.  Before this auto-de-fé,  VN undertook a rather radical revision of the Russian original that was published (improbably)   in Indianapolis in 1938. This version was appeared under the title Laughter in the Dark.

 

The TLS reports estimated sales prices as follows:

 

2002   ₤20,000--30,000   US$ approx:  40,000-60,000

2005    ₤18--22,000                             :  19,000-40,000

2008   ₤9,000--12,000                          :  18,000-24,000