An autographed manuscript from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. An unpublished verse penned by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. An editor’s copy of Phillis Wheatley Peters’ Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. These were just a few of the literary treasures in former Republican Vermont gubernatorial candidate Bruce Lisman’s book collection. The Bruce M. Lisman Collection of Important American Literature was sold at Christie’s auction house in New York City earlier this month. Through a live auction on June 15 and an online auction which took place from June 2 to 16, the sale closed for a total of $3,158,568. Lisman is a Burlington-born University of Vermont graduate who credits his father, a high school teacher, with inspiring his bibliophilic tendencies. After amassing a net worth of $50 million on Wall Street, Lisman returned to Vermont in 2009 and settled in Shelburne. In 2016, he ran for governor on a platform of reduced state spending and economic growth. Lisman lost the Republican nomination to Phil Scott, who went on to win the general election and has held the office since. [content-10] According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, in 1988, Lisman — then cohead of global equities at Bear Stearns — wandered into a New York book fair, a serendipitous encounter which piqued his interest in collecting. Over the next three decades, he began to accumulate rare volumes, manuscripts, and literary ephemera. Lisman’s hobby eventually brought him into possession of treasures touched by the most prominent American writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. In addition to Wheatley Peters, Longfellow and Whitman, Lisman’s collection also included work by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Washington Irving and Herman Melville. “His collection was the finest collection of American literature to come to auction in a generation,” said Heather Weintraub, a vice president and specialist in the Books & Manuscripts department at Christie’s, in an interview with Seven Days. Most significant, perhaps, was Lisman’s body of work by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the 19th century novelist best known for penning the high school syllabus evergreen The Scarlet Letter. According to Weintraub, Lisman’s was the largest privately owned collection of Hawthorne’s work. In Lisman’s Hawthorne assemblage: a multitude of letters, inscribed manuscripts, and leafs from personal notebooks, as well as a signed linen bag (hammer price: $3,780). Hawthorne and the other 19th century literary behemoths were considered to be “Part One” of Lisman’s collection and were sold by…