UNACCOUNTED FOR - Vol. 1: "Four Hundred and Fifty-One"

Ray Bradbury kept two IBM Wheelwriters in the basement of a yellow house in Cheviot Hills. Around them were masks, tin robots, dinosaur models, Disney cels, comic strips signed for him in the 1940s, before he was anyone the cartoonists had heard of, a model of the Nautilus built for him by Disney Imagineers, a small wooden desk he had used in the forties and kept after he stopped using it, thirty-one filing cabinets, and about four thousand books.

The room was twenty-four feet by eighteen. He worked in it for roughly half a century. When people asked him where the ideas came from, he did not explain. He turned in the chair and showed them the room.

He died in June 2012, at ninety-one. The room stopped being a room and became an estate.

The objects went to auction.

Nate D. Sanders in Los Angeles handled the sale in 2014. The printed catalogue ran to a hundred and forty-five pages and four hundred and sixty-two lots, and the description of what the lots were was accurate: things Bradbury had kept around his desk or had out on display, to look at while he worked.

The estimates sorted the room in a way the room had never sorted itself. A 1946 Charles Addams painting Bradbury owned, later used as the cover of From the Dust Returned, was estimated as high as $32,500. A Raymond Bayless painting of the Martian machines from The War of the Worlds, at least $17,500. Bradbury's personal print of Joseph Mugnaini's The Burning Man, the image that became the face of Fahrenheit 451, was estimated at five hundred dollars.

Mugnaini had worked with him for decades. The estimate measured the lot.

Bradbury estate lots were still crossing the block at the same house in October 2023.

The house went in January 2015.

Thom Mayne bought it the previous June, with his wife Blythe Alison-Mayne, for close to $1.8 million. Mayne is a Pritzker laureate. He has said he did not know whose house it had been when he bought it, that he bought it from a foundation with no connection to the Bradbury estate, and that the family had no interest in preserving it. Once he did know, it changed nothing. He said he could make no connection between the extraordinary nature of the writer and the un-extraordinariness of the house. His wife said it was one of the worst houses in the neighborhood.

The demolition permit issued on December 30, 2014. Fans found out when the walls were already down.

Mayne's office said afterward that the house had not been razed but deconstructed, so the materials could be recycled. The Douglas fir framing went to a furniture maker in Los Angeles and came back as bookends, each set stamped with a 451°F mark and hand-numbered. Four hundred and fifty-one of them.

They went on sale in June 2015 at $88.50 a set, with a certificate signed by Bradbury's daughter Alexandra and by the president of the salvage firm that had taken the house apart. They sold out. Within weeks the low numbers were on eBay at three and four times the price.

Part of the proceeds went toward the cost of rebuilding the office.

The paper went to Indiana.

The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at IU Indianapolis received the working core, donated by Bradbury's daughters and by Donn Albright, a Pratt professor who had known him for fifty years. The writing desk. The paint table. The bookcases and chairs. Thirty-one filing cabinets holding more than a hundred thousand pages of published and unpublished work. Four decades of correspondence. A working library of about four thousand books, including his own titles in some forty languages.

The Center built a recreation of the office around the furniture. Not the floors, walls, or built-ins, which no longer existed. The original bookcases, the awards, the artifacts, and a workbench fabricated to match the one that had run along the long wall.

The recreation shows the room as it was in the mid-1960s.

Bradbury went on working in it for another forty-five years after that. Whatever came into the room during those decades, and whatever it did to the arrangement, is not what stands in Indianapolis. The room in Indiana is a room that stopped existing about half a century before the man did, assembled out of furniture that outlived it, inside walls that were never his, in a state he did not live in.

For most people who will ever see it, it will be the room.

Jonathan Eller runs the Center and had spent years securing the papers. When the house came down he said plainly that they had never wanted it demolished. Afterward he learned what he could about what Mayne intended to build, and said he supported him going forward from that point. Mayne planned a wall inscribed with the titles of Bradbury's books.

Eller got the archive and lost the room, and had to decide in public which one he was owed.

One of the two Wheelwriters is at the Center, under glass. The other is in the public library in Waukegan, Illinois, where Bradbury was born. On the blue desk he used in his last years, the Center keeps a photograph of that desk as it looked in the basement, so a visitor can stand in front of the desk and compare it to the picture and see what is no longer on it.

Lot 456 in the 2014 catalogue was a group of hats Bradbury had personally owned. Among them was a set of Halloween mouse ears from Disneyland, where he had been brought out on the last night of October 2007 to throw the switch on a Halloween tree the park had built in Frontierland in honor of his book.

The lot sold.

There is no public record of who bought it, where the hats are kept, or whether they are ever taken out of the box.

Record consulted: Center for Ray Bradbury Studies collection and museum descriptions; Nate D. Sanders The Ray Bradbury Estate auction catalogue, Los Angeles, 2014; Los Angeles County demolition permit records; contemporaneous reporting in the Los Angeles Times, KCRW, The Architect's Newspaper, LAist and Curbed Los Angeles.