Poetic Find: A rare first edition of...

Poetic Find: A rare first edition of the poems of John Keats, printed in 1817 and bought from a south London street market stall for $54, sold for $16,830 at auction, Christie’s said. The slim volume, in its original drab-gray, paper-board cover was purchased Monday by Blackwell’s, the Oxford booksellers. The anonymous finder, an artist, said he saw the book in a box of odds and ends and had no idea it was a rarity. At the urging of a friend, he returned later to buy it. Keats died in Rome of tuberculosis in 1821 at age 25.

* Human Touch: A bank chairman who doesn’t like talking to machines has ordered all telephone-answering devices at his bank disconnected. From now on, only real people will answer the phones at Charlotte, N.C.-based First Union Corp., chairman Ed Crutchfield has decreed. Reaction has been positive. “I’ve gotten more mail about that doggone memo,” Crutchfield said. “Everyone says, ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ I had no idea everybody felt as much animus toward a machine as I do.” But spokeswoman Sandra Deem said Tuesday the bank’s automated teller machines and a system for electronically checking account balances will remain.

* Frequent Flier: Secretary of State James A. Baker III could top a quarter of a million miles in travel this year. The State Department said Baker has logged 235,274 miles this year--not including his current trip to the Soviet republics. He had visited 35 countries, including a few that did not exist the year before. In 1990, Baker’s total was a mere 208,069.

* Posthumous Degree: All of her life, Lorraine Moyer Lawton dreamed of being a college professor. But the Army reservist was killed at age 28 in a vehicle accident in Saudi Arabia last July after Persian Gulf War duty was extended. This week, Purdue University awarded Lawton a posthumous doctoral degree in comparative literature. “Her grandfather was a university professor, a Ph.D., sort of a hero to her. . . . She loved to teach. Obviously, she would have been delighted,” her husband, Benjamin Lawton of West Lafayette, Ind., said Tuesday.