'Casino Royale' first edition sells for £19,000

A rare first edition of Ian Fleming's first James Bond book, Casino Royale, has sold for £19,000 at an auction in South Cerney, Gloucestershire - reports the BBC.

The 1953 book, which sold for £4,000 more than expected, was the top lot at a sale at which Live and Let Die - the second Bond novel - went for £6,600.

A copy of Moonraker, the third in the series, sold for £7,200.

Meanwhile a copy of US comic Detective from May 1939, featuring Batman's first appearance, sold for £24,000.

Auctioneer Dominic Winter said "the strikingly colourful" Bond first editions had "always been one of the surest certainties over the last 30 years".

"The 007 film industry has helped that impetus by drawing in thousands of new fans keen to buy into the James Bond fantasy," he said.

It is thought the highest price for a Bond first edition was the £22,750 a signed copy of From Russia With Love fetched at Bloomsbury Auctions in London in 2004.

A signed first edition of Casino Royale is believed to have sold for £21,000, also at Bloomsbury, the following year.

At Thursday's auction, an original poster from the 1963 film version of From Russia With Love sold for £2,800.

Other items included a 1961 first edition of John le Carre's first book, Call for the Dead, which sold for £3,800.

A collection of books, proofs, letters and notes by the novelist Iris Murdoch sold for the same price.

Other first editions that sold on Thursday included an early Batman comic from 1940 that went for £9,500.

An original edition of the Superman comic, published in 1939, sold for £9,000.

In March, a copy of Action Comics featuring the Man of Steel's first appearance sold in the US for $1.5m (£960,000) - a record for a comic.

The previous record was held by another copy of Detective Comics in which Batman was first seen, which sold for $1.1m (£704,000) earlier that year.

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