Rare Charles Darwin Book In British Toilet?

What to do with great content? Keep it in the toilet for years, before you seed it? It happened with the first edition of Charles Darwin’s seminal On the Origin of Species. It will be sold this week after it was found in a family’s toilet in southern Britain, an auction house said a week ago.

The book, which was first printed in 1859, was bought by a family for just a few shillings in a shop about 40 years ago, Christie’s auction house said. The family has since kept the work on a bookcase in the guest lavatory at their home in the Oxford area, it said.

The book just went go under the hammer in London, last week, to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the publication of the father of the theory of evolution’s famous work. The book, about 1,250 copies of which were first printed, is expected to fetch 99,000 US dollars.

Margaret Ford, head of books and manuscripts at Christie’s, said the book would have been a bargain when it was bought by the present owner. “It’s incredibly important,” Ford said, adding of the current owner: “He knew it (the book) was textually important. He maybe did not know how much of a bargain he was getting.”

Christie’s said the son-in-law of the current owners was at an exhibition on Darwin and spotted a picture of the spine of the work. He realised the book in the toilet was something special, matching the binding of the work in the picture.

Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” set out his theory of evolution, by which species develop from generation to generation by a process of natural selection.

The link between viral and social marketing and Darwin’s hidden book?

Maybe we should not be so eager to get our precious and unique content immediately out to opinion leaders in the social space. But keep the original content in a safe and smelly place first for some years? We could tell people to look for our hidden viral video…