UPDATE: "Tamerlane and Other Poems" sold for $662,500, according to Christie's; no word on the buyer.

This afternoon, Christie's will auction a rare first edition of Edgar Allan Poe's first book, "Tamerlane," but don't hold your breath for a Baltimore buyer to claim it. The Baltimore Sun's Chris Kaltenbach explored the possibility of a local buyer emerging, but the cash-strapped Enoch Pratt isn't likely to bid for the book, estimated to cost at least $500,000. And the Johns Hopkins University's Sheridan Libraries, which has a Poe collection, also appears out of the running for "Tamerlane" -- one of only 12 copies known to exist. But maybe a local philanthropist will emerge.

Hey, I bet Tom Clancy could buy it, and donate it to a  library, if he just cut back on the carpet quality in his new $12.6 million penthouse. How about it, Tom?

Here's an excerpt from Kaltenbach's article: "You could probably say it's the Holy Grail of 19th-century American literature or American poetry," says Francis Wahlgren, a rare-books specialist who will serve as the auctioneer at the sale.

So rare, in fact, that there's not a single copy in Baltimore, the city where Poe began his professional writing career, where he died in 1849 and was buried, and which has spent the past year celebrating one of its favorite sons at every available opportunity. The nearest copy is in Philadelphia, in the collection of the Free Library there; the University of Virginia in Charlottesville used to have a copy, but that one was stolen in the 1970s.