Up for auction at Bonham’s in London on 11 December is a letter of recommendation Nabokov wrote in 1949 in Russian to Sergey Osipovich Yacobson, head of the Slavic department in the Library of Congress. Nabokov was seeking to help his sister-in-law, Sonia Slonim, get a position as a “research analyst”. The auction house’s estimate is $6000–8000, before the 25% premium. It is lot 1039.