Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Ian Fleming's Casino Royale goes under hammer for £4,000 more than expected


A rare first edition of the first James Bond book, Casino Royale, has sold for £19,000 at Dominic Winter’s auction House. Ian Fleming's 1953 book, went under the hammer for £4,000 more than was expected.

A first edition of Live and Let Die, the second Bond novel, went for £6,600 while a copy of Moonraker, the third novel in the series, sold for £7,200.

Auctioneer Dominic Winter said "the strikingly colourful" Bond first editions had "always been one of the surest certainties over the last 30 years". He said: "The 007 film industry has helped that impetus by drawing in thousands of new fans keen to buy into the James Bond fantasy."

The highest price for a Bond first edition is believed to be the £22,750 paid for a signed copy of From Russia With Love sold at Bloomsbury Auctions in London in 2004. A signed first edition of Casino Royale is believed to have sold for £21,000, also at Bloomsbury, the following year.

Other items sold at last Thursday's (December 16) auction included a 1961 first edition of John le Carre's first book, Call for the Dead, which sold for £3,800 and an original edition of the ‘Superman’ comic, published in 1939, which went for £9,000.

From IBookcollector # 241.
Ibookcollector © is published by Rivendale Press Ltd.

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