What is the most expensive book you have bought?

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Rangerton

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To answer my own question, mine is a book called 'To drop a dime' by Paul Hoffman and Ira Pecznick.

It's the true story of a hitman (Ira Pecznick) for the Campisi crime family in New Jersey. The title means to turn informer. It is a reasonably rare book in mafia books, which was why I had to have it :D

I paid £300 for it about 4 years ago. I have seen it selling for £350+ for decent Hardcover copies, like mine, and paperback for £200.
 
The most I ever spent on a book was about $60, for a first edition copy of Infinite Jest for my best friend.
 
I have quite a lot of collectibles; most paid, probably about £100 for a Longley limited, but most were got at a very reasonable price at the time of issue and are now worth a little more - not that I'm selling.
 
Around $100 for a Thomas Ligotti book.

I usually try to buy low and sell high. :)
 
I'm pretty sure the most I ever paid for a book was for a copy of the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia ed. by Michael Drout.

http://users.bestweb.net/~jfgm/EncyclopediaDiary/EncyclopediaReviews.htm

I forget exactly how much I paid, though it's written down somewhere; about $140, I think.

I also paid about $130 for a copy of Aids to Reflection in the magnificent Collected Coleridge series.

I don't remember paying over $100 for any other book.

The most I was ever prepared to spend for a book was for a scholarly work that had signature and notes by J. R. R. Tolkien. It was going for $430ppd. A bibliophile was selling a bunch of his books. Someone else beat me to it. I'm inclined to think that that was a good thing for me. I like books, but don't want to get into books as "treasures" exactly. I thought this was a special moment in my marriage, though: there was no way I was going to just buy this book and then tell my wife. I told her about the book and she okayed it, even though she is a lot less of a book collector than I am. I thought that was pretty great of her.
 
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I would spend up to $200 for this:

nesher554243.jpg


Pretty much my holy grail.

Actually, it looks like the price has come down on this over the years. I see some copies for around $80 on Abe. Think I'll finally pick one up.
 
All of my expensive ones were PKD, and all picked up at Forbidden Planet in Birmingham many decades ago - Cosmogony and Cosmology, a short pamphlet; In Pursuit of Valis hardcover; and Nick and the Glimmung, his children's book.

Now, by expensive I mean I think it was 30 pounds (I have no pound sign on my US keyboard, sorry) for the Cosmogony, which makes it pricey given its short length, and I think the Pursuit of Valis was maybe 70 pounds or something. Nothing that crazy.

I believe they are worth more now than what I bought them for then, though. And that's as collectible as I've ever been with books.
 
Hmmm... I'm not actually certain at this point. Probably it would be my copy of Hanns Heinz Ewers' Alraune from the John Day publishing firm (illustrated by Mahlon Blaine), for which I paid $375... but it would be a close thing between that and some of the 1940s Arkham House books, such as Robert E. Howard's Skull-Face and Others and W. H. Hodgson's The House on the Borderland and Other Novels, or Clark Ashton Smith's Lost Worlds....

Unfortunately, several years ago, I had to let nearly my entire Arkham House collection go due to a set of truly horrendous circumstances, and I've never been able to pick up any of these again since.....:(
 
THE TIMES ATLAS OF WORLD HISTORY, one of those big coffee table books. Cost me $80 back in the eighties. Kind of scary even back then but I was single and working full-time. Couldn't do that today. Nope, no way.
 
I don't think I've ever paid more than 20 euro on any book that I've ever bought. I get buyer's remorse easily when it comes to balancing out my finances at the end of the month, so I try to be reasonable with my purchases. And the most expensive things I've bought lately have been The lord of the rings 50th Edition (I think it's called, cute black set) to replace my old Romanian translation (you do not want to hear what they've done with some of the names in the book...was just painful) and The iron jackal by Chris Wooding as it's a first edition.
 
I've a few Star Wars books that were pretty expensive. (The two Chronicles books were 100 pounds each) and i have the limited edition versions of both the Dressing the Galaxy and Sculpting the Galaxy, although i suspect that they fall more into the category of collectibles rather than books.

Recently i bought the Star Wars Blueprints book from Forbidden Planet for about 300 pounds. That is one very nice volume. :)
 
$500 for a copy of Lawrence Durrell's first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers. It was published in 1935, did not sell very well, and most copies were destroyed by bombs during the Blitz. It was never reprinted, so if I wanted to read it then I had to buy it. There are allegedly less than a dozen copies of the book left.

Two years after I bought the book, a Canadian university finally got permission to reprint the book in paperback. They also reprinted Durrell's equally rare second novel, Panic Spring (as by Charles Norden). So I bought the paperbacks.
 
I would have thought that after that cover, I, Libertine would have to be incredible not to seriously disappoint. "A lusty, brawling isle seething in ferment in an age of spectacular abandonment" makes me expect something like a late Hammer film - you know, the ones where Dracula inexplicably ends up in a ladies' finishing school, and is played by Ingrid Pitt.

In terms of literal expense, probably some dreary legal tome only ever read by three people, or else Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, since I seem to have about six copies in differing levels of decay. The most impressive book I own, however, is a Victorian copy of Baron Munchausen, with very nice illustrations. It was quite cheap, though.
 
I would have a few, all in the range of about $300 -$400. One of he books on my final list for completion of my library goes for about $700 US... so I'm not sure if I'll ever prucahse it or not and NO I'm not going to say what it is at this stage..weird perhaps but I have my reasons.
 
Kierkegaurdian said:
The most I ever spent on a book was about $60, for a first edition copy of Infinite Jest for my best friend.
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Was it by any chance a signed copy as well? That would make it a quite valuable piece.

*For anyone who is not familiar with this seminal work, Infinite Jest is arguably the late David Foster Wallace's magnum opus and an outright masterpiece of the late 20th Century in the minds of many inlcuding myself.
 
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Damn I seem to be suffering form amnesia this evening....too much drool no doubt.

Anyway, I was in a position to purchase an amazing article a few years back at WorldCon in Japan but didn't quite have the nerve to go through with it. It was a first edition HB of one of H.P. Lovecraft's works. It may have been A Shadow Out Of Time? I can't recall now. It was Lovecraft's own personal copy he kept is his library, which subsequently was passed on to Robert Bloch (author of Psycho amongst other works) who knew Lovecraft and this resided in his personal library before being passed on to other collectors. Quite an interesting history no? OH..and it also contained original signatures by both Lovecraft and Bloch on boiler plate, inside cover. The price was just a mere $2,000 US but I rather think it will have gone up by now. Sigh....:(
 
$80 for very good second hand condition for The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" and Other Nautical Adventures: The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson Volume 1.

Same cost for The Jack Vance Treasury too.

I would esily pay $200-500 for books by the authors i want the most but lucky enough i dont need to.
 
Toby Frost said:
I would have thought that after that cover, I, Libertine would have to be incredible not to seriously disappoint. "A lusty, brawling isle seething in ferment in an age of spectacular abandonment" makes me expect something like a late Hammer film - you know, the ones where Dracula inexplicably ends up in a ladies' finishing school, and is played by Ingrid Pitt.
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It is written by Theodore Sturgeon as one of the greatest literary hoaxes of all time. Before the book was even written, students at colleges were writing papers on it, professors were teaching it, book buyers were ordering it, and I think it ended up on the New York Times best sellers list - remember, all before the book even existed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Libertine
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/06/the-i-libertine.html
 
j. d. worthington said:
Unfortunately, several years ago, I had to let nearly my entire Arkham House collection go due to a set of truly horrendous circumstances, and I've never been able to pick up any of these again since.....:(
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If you're ever interested, there is a book seller in Clovis, CA that has a complete set of the original Arkham House books.
 
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