We Have Often Featured Comics On Our Blog Before,

but never as rare - and expensive as this one,

it is the Action Comics #1, better known as the first ever Superman comic, long considered the “holy grail” for comic book collectors, approximately 50 – 100 copies of Action Comics #1 are thought to still be in existence, well this one has just been sold, what makes this particular copy rarest of the rare is its condition, this comic owned by comic book dealer Darren Adams, purchased it a few years ago from a collector, that collector in turn purchased the comic from its original owner who had housed it in a cedar box since the day he purchased it in 1938, as a result the comic is in exceptionally nice condition, rated a 9 out of 10 on a comic book rating scale, the last time this issue came to auction was in 2011 when actor Nicholas Cage sold his copy for $2.1m,

so the big question is how much did this one sell for? the answer a cool $3.2 million, (£1.9m), just imagine how much it would have fetched if it was rated 10 out of 10!

keeping to a rare published theme here is some good news, from the ashes of the fire that took place in the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany, one of the country’s finest special collections which suffered a terrible fire in 2004 as some 50,000 books were lost to the flames, a full 25% of which were considered by the library to be irreplaceable, one of the lost titles was Copernicus’s 1543 treatise De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Libri VI, an essential work in the history of science, the good news is that this month, ten years after the fire, the book was found again amongst a group of damaged books awaiting restoration, (the photo here is of the Library’s copy),

in the chaotic aftermath of the fire, books injured by flames, smoke, or water were put into groups based on their level of damage to await restoration, Copernicus’s work was placed in Group 4, amongst the most damaged books, where it languished for a decade while the books in Groups 1 – 3 were restored first, this year, the Duchess Anna Amalia Library finally began work on Group 4 and were overjoyed at finding Copernicus’s book again although not at quite the dizzying financial hieghts of the comic the book is still valued at $1.8 million despite its damaged state, the book itself was written toward the end of Copernicus’s life, it offers mathematical proof that the earth rotates around the sun and spins on its own axis, I would have thought it would have been worth more than a comic, but there it is.