About 10 years ago at WWT Slimbridge, I bought Birds Of The Western Paleartic Concise Edition, it was meant to be £135 but reduced to £49.95. Still quite pricey on amazon. The Birds of the Western Palearctic: Amazon.co.uk: David William Snow, Christopher Perrins: Books 1 new from £150.00 6 used from £90.00 Quite expensive on abe too. Between 95[ex-lb] & 175 quid. The Birds of the Western Palearctic - concise - AbeBooks
I bought a book called "The encyclopedia of weapons of WW2" by Chris Bishop, I think it cost about $150usd. But yes it was worth it. It is such an amazing book.
Ten years on, I still haven't topped the McKeowns or Hunnicutt price-wise, though it's possible overall volume might have occasionally peaked a tad.
£250 for Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy first editions. Was it worth it? Objectively, no; subjectively, yes.
By chance I’m half way through the Daniel Craig tv film of this. Enjoyable but not a patch on the books. I’m also finally reading Brideshead as bizarrely I’ve read all his others, but not that one.
Will someone sitting here glaring at you, occasionally checking their watch help? I just had a moment, as I thought "I had that book given to me when I was a nipper.". But I checked and its a different book entirely. My most expensive book was Dr Coox's excellent Nomonhan. Got it for about £45. Just checked and hardbacks are trading for £300, although the softback (like I have damn it!) are only £60. I am now wondering what hidden big cash prizes are in my book case though.
In reference books I think it'd the the special limited edition "When Dragons Flew" at around £100 (although for reference I use a standard copy) - in collectable books I think one of my RAF log books was about £550
Hmm... Ten years on and I still don't think I've gone above £150, though there are a few nudging that limit. Off the top of my head, the histories of the 3rd Gurkha Rifles, Green Howards and Cameron Highlanders were in that group, though the latter was for both volumes. Ignoring silly auto-prices on Amazon, the most expensive one to replace (that could be) is probably the History of the Combined Operations Organisation which is up for £550 for on ABEBooks. I'd better go and check that mine's alright...
At the risk of going off topic I find it harder to work out how much a book is actually worth recently. Amazon, abebooks and eBay(buy it now) are largely tied in now. You have to be lucky to clock when there’s suddenly price crashes on second hand copies across the boards on those three sites. My maximum is about £30 a book and even at that level there’s a lot of movement.
Like a good number of things that are 'out of whack' online, some of this may be attributed to algorithms. Automated listings on Amazon and eBay are set according to availability, and so during gaps in the market during which only one or two copies are listed, the price for any copy defaults to the maximum end of the range selected: frequently £999 or something implausible. Another such algorithm sets current stock with a minimum price equal to that of the last successful sale. This seems rational, but the owner of a rare title may well either 'bid-up' other copies of that book in auctions to inflate the apparent demand, or simply buy them at a high price to give themselves a monopoly of sorts on that title. Other human sellers--the non-professional ones--take from the forgoing the lesson that a given title is particularly rare and price their own copies artificially high.
Blimey! Seems to me that some people have more money than sense. Ah well, I'll go back to reading my 3 for a fiver books from The Works. Lesley
