JENNIFER PLATT | Frankly, that’s a monstrous amount of money

It was breaking news this week in the book world - the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein sold for a record-breaking $1.17m. That’s 17,279,496,00 ronds. It drives me nuts when people use the word ronds, but it seems apt here for emphasis on the ridiculous nature of currency. Apparently it was an “exceptionally rare” first edition and the record-breaking part is that it broke the world auction record for a printed work by a woman. 

So that made me curious. What was the most expensive book auctioned that was written by a non-woman? That was The Birds of America by John James Audubon, which sold in 2010 for $11.5m at Sotheby’s. That’s 169,876,275,00 ronds.

Why so much? Well maybe because it is considered art as well. Wiki explains it well: “The Birds of America is a book by naturalist and painter John James Audubon, containing illustrations of a wide variety of birds of the US. It was first published as a series in sections between 1827 and 1838, in Edinburgh and London. The work consists of 435 hand-coloured, life-size prints, made from engraved plates, measuring about 39 by 26 inches (99 by 66cm). Art historians describe Audubon's work as being of high quality and printed with ‘artistic finesse’.”

The most expensive painting sold at auction was The Image of Christ as The Saviour of the World by Da Vinci at Christie’s in a 2017 auction, where it sold for an obscene amount of $450m (6,646,725 000,00 ronds) to a proxy for Mohammed bin Salman. The same dude the CIA found responsible for ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Bin Salman, not the proxy.

So $1.17m is not that much considering that classic gothic novel is thought of as the world’s first science-fiction novel. The one sold at auction was one of the first 500 copies of the novel printed in 1818. Mary Shelley was also only 18 when she began writing it. So if you are one of those numerology folks, then these digits could prove meaningful. 

It does have one of the most interesting backstories of a book as well. 

It all started in 1816, the year that had no summer because of the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, among the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history in 1815. It created significant climate change and triggered extreme weather conditions in many countries about the world. Shelley was on a “summer” holiday in Lake Geneva with scoundrels - her soon-to-be husband Percy Shelley (who was married and whose wife Harriet committed suicide. He and Mary would marry later), Lord Byron (who was running away from his own scandal with his half-sister - just eeew!), Byron’s physician, John Polidori, as well as Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont. You can’t make this stuff up. They were stuck indoors because of the inclement weather and decided to have a writing competition.

After this, Polidori famously penned The Vampyre, published in 1819, which is considered the progenitor of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was published in 1897.

The night after they discussed the competition, Mary apparently wrote that she had a vision of Dr Frankenstein and his monster. So a classic was born and Percy tried to flog it as his own work, but his publisher turned him down. The horror, the horror! So it was published anonymously and Mary published a revised edition in 1831, under her own name. Thank franken goodness.