Two centuries after John Keats first put pen to paper to proclaim his love for his fiancée Fanny Brawne, blotted notes of the famed 19th-century poet recovered from the black market were on Monday displayed in a drab function room at the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
The very first letter Keats hand wrote to Brawne and 36 others, bound in fine gilt morocco and dated between 1819 and 1820, were among a trove of stolen literary gems recovered by DA Alvin Bragg’s antiquities unit and returned to the estate of the Whitney family. Bragg said their collective value was more than $3 million.
“While the family reported these works missing in 1989, they had not reappeared on the market until quite recently, in 2025 right here in Manhattan, when an individual attempted to sell them,” Bragg said at a press conference.
“Once we were made aware, we executed search warrants, seized them, and successfully petitioned a court of the New York Supreme to return them where they rightfully belong, which is with the Whitney family.”
Authorities recovered the works after a young man tried to sell them to B&B Rare Books and Adam Weinberger Rare Books in Manhattan, who reported the attempt to the DA’s office decades after former U.S. ambassador to the U.K. and publishing tycoon John Hay and his philanthropist wife Betsey Whitney reported them stolen from their sweeping estate in Manhasset, Long Island.
Bragg and Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos declined to identify the would-be reseller at Monday’s press conference, noting he said he had inherited them from his grandfather.
“The individual we seized the books from wasn’t even born at the time of the theft, so he didn’t do it, and the grandfather passed away in 2009,” Bogdanos said, noting prosecutors hadn’t identified any individuals responsible for the theft.
The prosecutor said the antiquities unit traced the books to South Carolina in 2006 but was unaware of their chain of custody until then.
Among the stolen collection displayed Monday was also a 1812 copy of “Almanach Imperial” owned by Napoleon’s first wife, Empress Josephine, embossed with her initials and valued at approximately $10,000.
A significant English translation of the 1882 “Household Stories of Grimm” by the Brothers Grimm, worth around $10,000, including tales like “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Hansel and Gretel,” was also among the cache of classics.
The trove also featured a 1914 edition of Oscar Wilde’s collection of epigrams in “Oscariana” and four letters the Irish poet and playwright wrote in 1906, valued at around $2,000, which were tucked inside a 1906 copy of “De Profundis,” a letter the length of a book that Wilde penned in jail — a workaround as inmates were forbidden from writing essays or novels.
Receiving the works Monday, John Hay and Betsey Whitney’s grandson, Peter di Bonaventura, said his grandparents were “extraordinary collectors” and that the collection was but “one example of their taste and their skill to collect, you know, going all the way back to the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ’40s.”
Di Bonaventura said the rare books would be auctioned for charity by the Whitney Foundation, bringing about a cyclical saga for Keats’ love letters reminiscent of James Joyce’s final novel, the 1939 “Finnegans Wake” about history repeating itself — a signed copy of which was also among the recovered works Bragg’s office displayed Monday.
Keats died of tuberculosis at the age of 25, with Brawne leaving the English poet’s letters to her children in 1865.
Though he was among the buyers when Sotheby’s auctioned them in 1885, Wilde was so upset by the sale of Keats’s love letters that he expressed his disgrace in a sonnet, titled “On the Sale By Auction of Keats’ Love Letters,” in which he lamented “the brawlers of the auction mart [who] Bargain and bid for each poor blotted note.”