Christie's, which is auctioning a stained and frayed copy in New York, said the book could set a record price for American literature. Poe wrote the poems, inspired by the work of Byron, as he tried to launch his literary career after moving from his childhood home in Virginia to Boston, the city of his birth. He had at the time been trying to distance himself from his foster father, John Allan, in Richmond, Virginia, with whom he had a difficult relationship.

The book was published in complete obscurity, paid for entirely by the author and printed by a man who normally produced flyers and labels. When he later re-published the poems under his own name, Poe apologised for their quality and said they had never been intended for publication. A copy of the original book did not surface until more than 25 years after it was published, prompting some poetry experts at the time to claim it had never existed.

That was big news in Berwick, an old manufacturing city of 10,000 residents about 150 kilometres northwest of Philadelphia, where Franklin, using the pseudonym Richard Saunders, printed thousands of copies of his almanac between 1733 and 1760, dispensing advice and aphorisms along with "lunations, eclipses, judgment of the weather" and other data relevant to the 40-degree latitude "from Newfoundland to South Carolina."

The celebration for historical society members began on the trip back home from New York. "We're on the second bottle of champagne," historical society president Thomas McLaughlin said when reached on his cellphone aboard the bus taking 14 society members back to Berwick. McLaughlin said that when the society inquired of experts about the almanac's value, the first estimate was $7,000 to $10,000, but it rose sharply after the Library Company of Philadelphia, which Franklin founded, determined the book not only was real but also was one of only three 1733 copies known to exist.

The experts said it was authentic based on the original binding, the ink and the printing, but even then the presale estimate was only $100,000 to $150,000. Selby Kiffer, an authority on historical American documents who examined the almanac for Sotheby's, said it "had that right look." "It's like finding a fossil in its matrix," Kiffer said. "It's a cliche to say something is once in a lifetime until you have an opportunity like this."