Want vampire novelist Anne Rice’s $25,000 Tiffany flatware? Bidding is now open

Vintage sterling Tiffany flatware, ornate chess sets from early 20th-century Europe, and annotated copies of “The Godfather” are just some of the items from the estate of gothic fiction novelist Anne Rice for sale in an online auction that opens Monday. 

“Elegance of the Eternal: The Anne Rice Collection,” hosted by the San Francisco auction house Bonhams, runs through Halloween and includes fascinating curios like a gilt album of photographs from St. Elizabeth’s Orphanage in New Orleans and a Royal Crown Derby porcelain dinner service.

Opening bids start at $10, but — as befitting a writer whose books have sold more than 100 million copies — the items likely won’t come cheap. Bonhams estimates that a 20th anniversary copy of her novel “Interview With the Vampire,” with a margin note scrawled by Rice in anticipation of a radio appearance, will bring in between $800 and $1,000. The 24-piece Tiffany service looks to net between $15,000 and $25,000. And those estimates could be conservative if a bidding war breaks out among superfans of the author, who died in 2021 at the age of 80. 

Although closely associated with New Orleans, where she was born, Rice lived in San Francisco on and off beginning in the early 1960s. She studied at San Francisco State University when it was an all-male institution by day — in an echo of vampires’ nocturnal habits, women could take classes only at night. And it was in the Bay Area that she penned “Interview With the Vampire” — the titular interview is conducted in a Victorian home at 503 Divisadero St. — and, with husband Stan, raised son Christopher, also a novelist. Rice wrote installments of the 13-book “Vampire Chronicles” series in Northern California before returning to New Orleans in 1988.

While she struggled to win the approval of literary critics early in her career, she inspired intense devotion in readers. “When I go to my signings,” Rice famously told ABC News in the 1990s, “I’m the most boring person there. Everybody else is dripping with velvet and lace and bringing me dead roses wrapped in leather handcuffs, and I love it.” She may have been downplaying her personal style, as the auction contains items like a strass-embellished gold-tone necklace and a crushed-velvet knee-length jacket.

The 1994 film adaptation of “Interview With the Vampire,” starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Christian Slater, takes place in San Francisco, and the haunting final scene occurs on the Golden Gate Bridge. While it may not be wise to replicate the scene, which involves Cruise commandeering a moving car, it would be stunning to cross the span wearing Rice’s sparkling velvet long vest.