A first edition of Gray’s “Elegy” (1751) has been sold at Sotheby’s for £830. The record price for a Gray’s “Elegy” is £1,550 in 1924 and last year a copy was sold for £950. Originally the work was only a few shillings a copy.
[From the Watford Observer of July 9, 1927]
NOTE: In today's terms, £830 would equate to around £43,230 if purely taking inflation into account. In terms of economic worth (how much you could buy with it) the figure for £830 rises to somewhere around £285,900.
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