The world’s most expensive books

For two hours on May 28 you could have spent £750 on a special, limited edition of The Devil May Care, the new James Bond Novel written by Sebastian Faulks. Published by Penguin in collaboration with Bentley, Bond’s car manufacturer of choice, each book comes in a burnt oak leather case sourced from the tannery in Italy which supplies the hides for Bentley’s interiors. Purchasers also receive a 1:43 scale replica of the modified Bentley R type that featured in Thunderball and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. (The car never actually existed but Bentley based the miniatures on Fleming’s detailed descriptions.)

Would it have been worth it? From a purely financial viewpoint the answer seems to be a resounding ‘yes’. Only sixteen days later a copy has appeared on the Abe Books website priced at $3,500 (around £1,780). In just over two weeks the book has more than doubled in value.

Still, £1,780 is a modest enough sum when compared to last year’s £3m business book. Dancing with the Bear, by British business-entrepreneur Roger Shashoua, is an account of how the author made his fortune in post-Soviet Russia. Helpfully subtitled ‘The Inside Track to Making Mega-Millions in Russia’, I’m curious to know who the target audience is. After all, anyone willing to pay the multi- (if not mega-) million asking price is presumably in no great need of money-spinning advice. The 600 flawless diamonds embedded in the cover are probably more of an attraction than the story inside. I imagine that very few of the 300 Bond books will be read either: having spent that sort of money you wouldn’t want to find coffee stains on the pages.

The limited editions of both The Devil May Care and Dancing with the Bear have become important primarily as objects, valued for their physical form rather than their content. They may be extreme examples, but as we increasingly look to the digital world for our reading matter, so the printed magazine or book gains additional importance as an artefact. It’s been some time since most newspapers and magazines were able to rival their digital counterparts in terms of price, speed and mass distribution. Once the right technology is in place, book publishing will presumably follow a similar trajectory. At some point it probably makes sense to stop competing in these areas and to focus on the niche aspects of print publishing, on things that can’t be replicated digitally: the pleasure of holding a beautiful object in your hands; the enjoyable suggestion of exclusivity; the idea of owning a tangible piece of history.

And the most expensive book-shaped piece of history ever sold? That record was set back in 1994 when Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codex Leicester, a notebook filled with original drawings, notes and sketches, changed hands for $30.8 million dollars. The purchaser? Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

Read Roy Robins’s piece on James Bond as one of literature’s most enduring and desirable characters.