Robert Graves - Good-Bye to All That - £3,750 T.S.Eliot - Prufrock and Other Observations - £17,500 J.R.R.Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings - £20,000 John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath - £6,133 J.D.Salinger - Catcher in the Rye - £7,320 George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four - £8,060 Graham Greene - The Power and the Glory - £8,296Ī.A.Milne - The Christopher Robin Books - £13,084 William Golding - Lord of the Flies - £5,736 James M Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice - £3,172Īrthur Conan Doyle - The Hound of the Baskervilles - £3,000į.Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby - £246,636į.Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night - £10,370 Scott Fitxgerald worth an incredible £246,000. Twenty years ago a copy was worth £190, but it's now valued at around £5,124 - a growth of 2,579 per cent.īut the most expensive first edition is The Great Gatsby by F. The enduring appeal of the 007 agent, no doubt helped by his latest reincarnation through Daniel Craig, has seen its worth jump by 874 per cent to £24,000, according to Stanley Gibbons.Ī first edition of Live and Let Die was worth around £480 in 20 years ago, and is today worth an estimated £8,060 - a value increase of 1,579 per cent.īut the first edition book that has seen the highest value growth since 1996, from a list of 30 twentieth century classics, is George Orwell's Animal Farm. If you'd put it all on red, and bought Ian Fleming’s first James Bond book Casino Royale in 1996 when the tome was worth around £2,482, the gamble would have paid off. A number of 20th Century classics would now fetch tens - or even hundreds - of thousands of pounds at auction after seeing double-digit value growth over the last twenty years, according to Stanley Gibbbon Investments.

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