 The collection, rich in inscribed first editions and manuscript material of eighteenth and nineteenth century authors, sold for a total of $1,729,462.50 – a record for a single-owner sale that stood for over fifty years.Among the books he sold were first or early editions of poems by Robert Burns and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and works by Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens, as well as manuscripts by Alexander Pope, John Keats, Shelley, Lord Byron, Thomas Hardy and others.In 1929 Kern made his first trip to Hollywood to supervise the 1929 film version of "Sally", one of the first "all-talking" Technicolor films.