The book that comes with its own piece of moon rock

Phenomenal! I've just learned that the record for the most expensive sale in the history of AbeBooks, held for 12 long years by a first edition of The Hobbit which went for US $65,000, was broken practically as soon as it featured here in January (Fetish vessels of cash: the world's most expensive books)!

That honour now belongs to a rare book of ornithology published in Italy in 1765. Its five volumes of hand-coloured engravings of birds took the two illustrators ten years to complete, and have garnered attention throughout its 2.5 centuries of life for how the birds, with their "lively posturing" (as an AbeBooks expert described it), seem to reflect the "human comedy" of 18th century Italian society. That's what it said, 18th century, but this raptor reminds me a lot of a certain 20th century Italian dictator!

photo: AbeBooks

The lively birds are the first six-figure sale for AbeBooks, the anonymous collector having shelled out US $191,000. The news item on the AbeBooks website about the sale lets you see, besides a slideshow of some of the engravings, what other books they have on sale at that cost, namely:

• An inscribed first edition of The Sun Also Rises
• The birds of Europe, a 19th century ornithological book in ... fancy that, five volumes
• A second folio edition of Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies

Now you're talking! A second folio! I can't believe this hasn't been snapped up yet. What are these rich people doing with their disposable income?

AbeBooks has some ideas. For the same amount, they say, you could get one of these:

• A brand new 2015 Ferrari California
• A one-bedroom flat in central Manchester with a roof garden
• A diamond ring featuring a six-carat ruby

Well! As it happens, last year I was invited to a Ferrari meet and got to take a turn around the track in a California. I wasn't driving it, I was riding shotgun, but I did get to push the start button. And wear an official Ferrari owner hat, given to me because the California is a convertible and the sun was turbocharged that day. (I didn't realise that the hat said 'Ferrari Owner' and experienced some gleeful moments when people would ask me which Ferrari was mine, before the truth was broken to me.)

It was truly a high, a communion with the beauty of the machine taken to a whole new level. What can I say? If I were so rich that I could take care of everyone and still have $200,000 burning a hole in my pocket, I don't know if I'd spend it on a Ferrari, but if it were $500,000, I might buy the Second Folio and a Ferrari. There is, however, a key difference between the two, which is that I would never want to give the Second Folio up, whereas I'm not convinced I would keep a Ferrari once the newness wore off.

Eight people in the world have spent that kind of money to buy themselves a book which is neither old nor irreplaceable, but which comes with something rarer and more exotic than a Ferrari, even:  a moon rock.

This novelty is the brainchild of publisher Benedikt Taschen, the man who started out back in the eighties, still a teenager, by selling his comic book collection, and never looked back, moving on to remaindered art books, and then reprinted (by him) art books, before making his name in publishing with a genial new kind of affordable art book whose maximum expression was the series of 1000 photographs of some thing: record covers, tattoos, chairs. Was the choice of 1000 over the more usual 100 a first hint of the now-overt megalomania of the man who claims that from the start, his goal was to make the greatest books in the world? Who prints on the title pages of his company's great (size, subject, workmanship and price) art books that they are "Directed and produced by Benedikt Taschen"?

The production in question is Moonfire, a book which Taschen put out in 2009 in a limited edition of 1969 copies, to mark the 40th anniversary of the Apollo ll moon landing. And in what can only be seen as perfect casting, the text is by Norman Mailer, a new reprise of his coverage of the moon shot for Life magazine. This is the author whose ego was so big that, as someone pointed out, he not only decided to run for mayor of New York, but continued to think he could win even after he'd been convicted of stabbing his wife with a penknife, possibly because she was taunting him about being a lesser writer than Dostoevsky, at a party for his campaign.

The last 12 copies of the limited edition, numbers 1958 through 1969, contain a piece of moon rock. Not one of the rocks gathered on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, though you'd be forgiven for thinking that, seeing as the term used for this special edition of the limited edition is "Lunar Rock Edition", but a piece of the moon, nonetheless, from an asteroid of lunar origin.

Here's Book No. 1,969 (cost, about US $ 520,000):

www.taschen.com

It comes in a designer case which playfully resembles a coffee table, with aluminum legs shaped like the Apollo 11 landing module struts, and a surface which reproduces the lunar surface.

Here's its rock:

www,taschen.com

Eight of the twelve Lunar Rock editions have been sold, but four are still available, at a price.

What's priceless is Mailer's prose.

The television image was improving. It was never clear, never did it look any better in quality than a print of the earliest silent movies, but it was eloquent. Ghosts beckoned to ghosts, and the surface of the moon looked like a ski slope at night. Fields of a dazzling pale ran into caverns of black, and through this field moved the ghost of Armstrong. There were moments when one had the impression it was possible to see through him. His image was transparent.

Aldrin descended the ladder, then jumped back on the lowest rung to test his ability to return to the Lem. The abruptness of the action broke the audience into guffaws again, the superior guffaw a sophisticate gives to a chair creaking too crudely in a horror movie. Now two ghosts paraded about, jogging forward and back, exchanging happy comments on the new nature of hopping and walking, moving faster than a walk but like much-padded toddlers, or overswathed beginners on skis. Sometimes they looked like heavy elderly gentlemen dancing with verve, sometimes the sight of their boots or their gloves, the bend of their backs setting up equipment or reaching for more rocks gave them the look of beasts on hindquarters learning to think, sometimes the image went over into negative so that they looked black in their suits on a black moon with white hollows, sometimes the image was solarized and became positive and negative at once, images yawing in and out of focus, so the figures seemed to squirt about like one-celled animals beneath a slide -- all the while, images of the Lem would appear in the background, an odd battered object like some Tartar cooking pot left on a trivet in a Siberian field.. It all had the look of the oldest photographs of expeditions to the North Pole -- there was something bizarre, touching, splendid, and ridiculous all at once, for the feat was immense, but the astronauts looked silly, and their functional conversations seemed farcical in the circumstances.

"What did you say, Buzz?"
"I say the rocks are rather slippery."


You can read it in a later, non-limited edition of Moonfire from the library, and the amazing photographs and maps are there too. Norman Mailer didn't get to see the special edition either; he died in 2007. The New York Post reported that one of his sons, an actor, had sung "Candle in the Wind" at his funeral. How ridiculous, said Stephen Mailer. A forest fire in a hurricane is more like it.

You can read more about Taschen's limited collector's editions on the Taschen website. A monograph on Ai Weiwei which comes wrapped in a silk scarf, with its own marble bookstand, anyone?

--Karen

Fetish-vessels of cash: the world's most expensive books

You may have noticed that I am not a fan of "Best books of the year" lists. Not because I don't enjoy recommending books; it's that "best" that gets me, because "And how should I presume?", to borrow Prufrock's refrain.

How should anyone presume to identify the best? Best for whom? One of my most pleasurable book memories is of chuckling my way through The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker's paean to procrastination, but a non-procrastinator would undoubtedly find the book a waste of time (worst possible insult). Or, best for which station on our route? If your parents are still alive and on top of things, Roz Chast's memoir Can't we talk about something more pleasant? may seem a grim read, whereas for me it brimmed with poignancy.  "Best" is so subjective!

Did you know that AbeBooks -- the online marketplace of new and used books whose claims of offering "the greatest selection of books found anywhere" I firmly believe (it's actually a network of bookshop websites) -- produces every year an intriguing booklist based on a totally objective formula? Not "best" but "most", and specifically, most money. Which books did avid collectors spend the most for on AbeBooks?

(AbeBooks)

For 2014, the list was headed by a five-volume collection of a monthly illustrated French publication Les Maîtres de L'Affiche, or "Masters of the Poster", published between 1895 and 1900, which fetched US$ 43,350. Half the top ten were in fact collections of journals, treatises, or encyclopedias.

The other half, well, who would have thought that Das Kapital itself would one day become some rich capitalist's fine fetish-vessel of cash? An 1867 edition sold for US$ 40,000. The others were a first edition of Call for the dead, John le Carré's first novel and debut of the spy George Smiley (US$ 22,500); a 1969 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Salvador Dali who had also signed it (US$ 20,000); a first-edition A Farewell to Arms inscribed by Ernest Hemingway (US$ 18,000); and a collection of Salman Rushdie first editions (US$ 16,162).

You can see all top 50 titles on the AbeBooks website.

And what is the most expensive book ever sold on AbeBooks? A first edition of ... The Hobbit, which went for US$ 65,000.

Pre-movie dust jacket. (Abebooks)

But of course the really huge sales, the million dollar and more ones, aren't made online. The author of the aforementioned Das Kapital affirmed that private property makes people stupid? Well, not that stupid! When you're spending that kind of money, you want to see what you're getting.

Here's a list of the ten most expensive books ever purchased -- usually at auction, where I expect serious bidders (up to your imagination how the Auction House would determine this) would have been able, duly supervised, to hold the book, as long as they had white gloves on, of course. You might want to imagine you are wearing a pair as you peruse it.

List of the ten most expensive book purchases in the world

1. The Codex Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci - US$ 30.8 million

Bill Gates bought this 72 page notebook filled with Leonardo da Vinci's handwritten scientific musings at an auction in 1994. It seems incredible to me that something like this could be in private hands at all, even though the do-gooding Mr Gates did scan it and turn it into a screensaver anyone could enjoy, as long as they were users of Microsoft windows.





2. St Cuthbert Gospel - US$ 14.3 million
 
Lots of superlatives here. Described by the British Library as "one of the world's most significant books", the St Cuthbert Gospel could actually be considered the world's most expensive book, as the Codex Leicester is technically a paper document.  This 7th-century pocket gospel book is the earliest known Western bookbinding to survive, and, with a page size of only 138 by 92 mm, one of the smallest surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. From 1979 it was on long-term loan from the British province of the Jesuit order to the British Library, which in July 2011 launched a fundraising campaign to buy the book for £9 million. Less than a year later, in April 2012, it was announced that the purchase had been completed and the book was now British Library. Restores your faith in the world.


3. The Bay Psalm book - US$ 14.2 million

This psalter, or book of psalms, is one of just 11 surviving copies of 1,700 which were printed in 1640 -- the first book printing in what became the United States. It belonged to the Old South Church in Boston and was sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $14.2 million in November 2013. It was purchased by financier and philanthropist David Rubenstein who plans to loan it to various libraries across the United States. Well done, David!







4. The Rothschild Prayerbook - US$ 13.4 million 

A 16th century Flemish illuminated manuscript book of hours which was "confiscated" from the Rothschild family immediately after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. The Austrian government finally returned the book to the Rothschilds in 1999, and it was sold by Christie's that same year for £8,580,000 (then US$ 13,400,000), still the world record auction price for an illuminated manuscript. The prayerbook was offered for sale again at Christie's in 2014 and purchased for £8,195,783. The anonymous bidder was eventually revealed as Australian businessman Kerry Stokes, but the Prayerbook remains unrevealed, part of Stokes's private collection in Perth.

5. The Gospels of Henry the Lion, Order of Saint Benedict — US$ 11.7 million

A masterpiece of the 12th century Romanesque illuminated manuscript which the German government purchased from Sotheby’s in 1983.

6. Birds of America, James Audubon — US$ 11.5 million

One of America's favourite books, and how could it not be, many Birds of America appear on lists of expensive books. This complete first edition sold at Sotheby's in 2010. Many also are the ingenious ways libraries holding copies share them with the public, eg the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University has a daily "page turning" event at 3:15 p.m. in the Academy's Ewell Sale Stewart Library. 

7. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer — US$ 7.5 million

Of the dozen known copies of the 1477 first edition, this copy, sold by Christie's in 1998, was the last to be held privately. It was originally purchased for £6 by Earl Fitzwilliam at the sale of the library of John Ratcliffe, a chandler, in 1776. 

8. First Folio, William Shakespeare — US$ 6.1 million

The First Folio’s original price was a single pound (one or two more for a leather-bound copy). Now, only 228 (out of the original 750) survive, and it's one of the most highly prized finds among book collectors. This sale was in 2001, to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Auckland Libraries has the only First Folio in New Zealand (in fact, it has all four folios). Sir George Grey bought it for the library for £85 (after turning down one in perfect condition priced at £255) in 1894. 

9. The Gutenberg Bible — US$ 4.9 million

A then-record price from 1987. Only 48 Gutenberg Bibles — the first books to be printed with movable type — exist in the world.


10. Traité des arbres fruitiers, [Treatise on Fruit Trees] by Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau, illustrated by Pierre Antoine Poiteau and Pierre Jean François Turpin — US$ 4 million

There had to be a treatise. This one, dated 1768, is on fruit trees, 16 different varieties.  Only 16? The sale was made in 2006.

The important thing to remember, of course, is that these are not values, but prices. Putting a value on a book... ah, there we are again, back in the subjective! What is your most valuable book? Would it be the one which would fetch the highest price at an auction?