Tintin Forums

Hi,
I have come across a couple of 1st edition (engllsh, 1959) with the red cloth spine. The guy selling them is asking quite a lot. Are these ones particulaly rare and special? Any help wildly appreciated. J.

That would be a first edition english version they go for about £125 in some rare book shops,even more on Ebay maybe.Which first editions are they?

Thanks Number1fan,

Its the two moon books.

I think the best thing to do is to keep an eye on somewhere like eBay for a while, and guage the market; it is amazing how varied prices can be.
I'd think that £125 was definitely a top-of-the-range, on-a-good-day price for an absolutely pristine book: you can often see them for a lot less, and I'm not sure that the albums are getting as much as they were a couple of years back.
What matters most is what people are prepared to pay, not how much you ask for.

Update: I just took a quick look on abebooks.co.uk, and there're copies on there with one dealer listed at £137; another has first editions at £46. Someone else has a 1965 edition with the red cloth spine at a tenner.

Thanks for that.
Yes it does seem a lot. However its pretty amazing that they are now over 50 years old these books. I had a scan of that sale in France and was pretty amazed at the prices listed for the original b/w series of books.

Oh quite so, they are getting on (as we all are!). But they seem to have been printed in quite large numbers, so aren't necessarily that rare, and there are a limited number of collectors in the English market.

That's a good example of the difference. The early B&W albums were in small runs and short supply even at the time; add to that paper shortages, depression-era poverty and war-time, and those early titles are rare.
Mix with a very active Francophone collector market, and demand out-stripping supply, and you have the recipe for high prices!