8 Ridiculously Expensive Books

The priciest books in the world - we're talking those in the Hampton's summer home range - are usually valued for their antiquity and connection to a time long past. But lately we've seen emerging book collectors with an affinity for the modern, the damaged, the quirky and the recently influential.

For example, on sale recently at Peter Harrington Rare Books: an $189,000 dust jacket, from a copy of the first "Great Gatsby" cover, featuring an editor's ink correction on an uncapitalized "jay Gatsby."

Charles Scribner boasted of the jacket, "like the novel it embellishes, this Art Deco tour-de-force has firmly established itself as a classic. At the same time, it represents a most unusual, in my view, unique form of 'collaboration' between author and jacket artist."

This isn't just self-promotion on the publisher's part. After seeing the cover, Fitzgerald added a description of the iconic image into the novel, writing "I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and binding signs..."

Here are some other wildly expensive books, from the archaic to the peculiar: