Book signed by Anne Frank sells for $62,500

NEW YORK – A book of fairy tales that belonged to Anne Frank sold for $62,500 dollars at a New York auction on Thursday, Swann Auction Galleries said.

The 1925 edition of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” including “Snow White” and “Hansel and Gretel,” belonged to Frank and her sister Margot, whose names are written on the title page, the auction house said, adding that the book went for more than double its estimated price.

The auction included half a dozen potential buyers and lasted a minute, a spokesman for the auction house said.

“The Diary of a Young Girl,” which Frank wrote while hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic from June 1942 to August 1944, has sold more than 30 million copies and been translated into 67 languages.

She died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany less than a year later after the Nazis discovered her family members.

They had left the book of fairy tales behind in their Amsterdam apartment before going into hiding.

A Dutch couple bought the book at a second-hand bookstore in Amsterdam soon after the war, Swann Auction Galleries said on its website.

When they discovered the Frank sisters’ names in 1977, they offered to return it to Otto Frank, the family’s sole survivor, the auction house said.

Thursday’s sale included a 1977 letter from Otto Frank written in reply.

“Understanding from your letter your compassion for what has happened to us,” he wrote, “it would please me if you kept the book for your daughter, in memory of my children.”