How much???

I once spent thirteen pounds and ninety nine pence on a compact disc. That included postage and packing and came from the company who made it. It is still available from said company at the aforementioned price. £13.99 including postage and packing for a shrink wrapped copy of Doctor Who “Primeval”. A reasonable story – neither a must have classic nor a must avoid dud. So far, so normal. You are asking yourselves “Why mention this? Is this a cheap plug for www.bigfinish.com ? Actually I bring this up, and in such fiscal detail, because my attention was recently drawn to an eBay auction where a second hand copy of this CD is currently going for £41. Plus £1.25 postage and packing. It isn’t autographed, it isn’t special in any way. It is a bog standard used CD and is going to cost the current bidder £42.25 which you don’t need telling is £28.26 more than they need to pay. I also don’t need to point out that is almost exactly three times the price.

I was ready to put this down to the eBay effect. Some people hate to lose such things. All it takes is two guys who have never met but who take each others bidding as a personal insult to raise the price of a normal item to superhuman proportions. But looking at the bidding shows that the £41 Kid was the second bidder. The bidding opened with £4.99. Then came the Forty One Pound Kid with his insane bid. A third bidder tried five times to beat the FOPK but gave up when the scale of his madness became clear. Who knows if that was the FOPK’s top bid? Who knows how far he would go? Maybe its some kind of Brewsters Millions style scenario. Someone has vast sums to get rid of within a week and this was the best way they could think of to do it. Possibly it wasn’t a million pounds – maybe it was just fifty.

But this is not the end of the week’s insanity. Sit back for a moment and ponder spending £42 for a £14 CD. Have you done that? Right. That is the warm up over with. Your incredulity muscles have been stretched and warmed up. Brace yourself for the goat.

No – not a biography of Sean Goater. That day will come but not yet. GOAT is a new book about Muhammad Ali which boasts of lots of pretty pictures and a limited edition print run. It doesn’t come cheap though. Does it cost as much as “Doctor Who – The Legend” which appalled fans by tipping the cash scales at £40? It costs a little more. On the plus side it does qualify for free Super Saver Shipping.

It costs two thousand pounds.

Repeat.

Two thousand pounds.

But – you are shouting between sips of brandy – it is a limited edition. It is an investment. Yes it is a limited edition. One of only ten thousand copies.

Ten thousand?

Yes. Ten thousand. £20,000,000 worth of books. So you have little chance of your two grand tome becoming worth a fortune as there are another nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine copies out there. All you’ve got is a book of pretty pictures of people punching each other in the head until one or both suffers temporary or permanent brain damage.

I thought it must be a misprint. Amazon have had the odd case in the past where goods have been wrongly priced. I myself took advantage of one of them and got I Clavdivs for £18 instead of £45. This had to be a boob (some say blunder) on their part. £200 would be ridiculous but not as ridiculous as £2,000. So I checked Amazon.com to see how much they wanted.

Three thousand dollars.

Which, admittedly, works out at about £1,600 at current exchange rates but customs would no doubt hammer the bargain hunter with duties and taxes to the point that it isn’t worth the effort. So it wasn’t a misprint. It really is that obscenely expensive.

But wait.

Hold hard.

The limited edition collector’s edition is for the plebs. The proles. The hoi polloi. The discerning eye would only be drawn to the Champ’s edition. Limited to one thousand copies it retails at seven and a half thousand dollars. It boasts a few extra pictures from what I can see. There isn’t really much else you could add. You could have Ali sign it twice but that’s about it.

The moral of this story is that you should keep your eyes peeled in The Works, County Books or whatever your local discount bookshop is for “GOAT – Greatest of All Time” because it could be the best fiver you’ve ever spent.

5th January 2004