Over the last few weeks I’ve undertaken an activity which up to now has been alien to me, namely getting rid of books. My wife has decided I now have to have a ‘one in, one out’ regime so I’ve been passing on some titles I’m quite happy never to see again. It was while sorting some tatty duplicates to give to a great National Trust bookshop at Baddesley Clinton I started looking at dates and prices. I now present my equivalent of the Big Mac Index but for Nevil Shute titles from the mid 70’s.

It was comparing the prices on a couple of copies of ‘No Highway’ as below I noticed the huge variation over just a couple of years, was there rampant inflation then?

It’s interesting to see on the 13th edition there is just the faint remnants of pricing that must have been for the 12th edition as it says the Australian price was $1.20. All apart from ‘The Chequer Board’ are listed not for sale in Canada. The 1974 edition of this title is priced $1.25 and a year later had gone up to $1.95

The 11th edition from 1974 and the 13th edition from 1976

I mentioned in the last blog  the book ‘The Unborn’ and that it was inscribed to what I thought said Peter Parr but it turns out it was to Peter Pann, the nickname of Peter Tietjen who has appeared in previous blogs and  who worked at PAN in the 70’s. It was a complete fluke I found the connection but Peter says he auctioned off a lot of his signed copies only recently.

I was really ‘chuffed’ to be contacted by Gavin Scott (and not me doing the badgering as usual) He very kindly said “I’m a great fan of your site, which I think is superbly organised and very rich” Thanks Gavin and I’ll have more from Gavin in the next blog.

PS I don’t think my wife noticed I came back from Baddesley Clinton with three books under my coat. One is for a ‘Jalna’ page I’m putting together but as usual books are arriving very slowly from the States but should all be here in a couple of weeks.