Yeah, but is it WATA rated?

Hey, someone just paid one million, one hundred and seventy thousand dollar for--get this: not a video game. A book. They paid $1.17 million for a book. A three-volume, first edition of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Yeah, that's the whole title. The weird punctuation, the "or," the second title. It's was a 1800's thing I guess.

"Well, they pay by the word, so..."

-Mary Shelley, on padding it out

Spontaneous combustion, incidentally, was
another dumb thing people believed back then.

To further contrast this from the recent spate of the ludicrous sale prices of decades old, but not really all that hard to find video games, Shelly's first edition of Frankenstein is legitimately rare. Shelly published five hundred copies in 1818, and did so anonymously because in the past everyone was a bunch of ignorant goons and the idea that a woman had not only written a book, but had written a book dealing with murder, alienation, and the implications of creating life, would have literally caused readers to spontaneously combust. 

Obviously the misogynistic, ignorant, classist, 
racist, 18th century is more screwed up, but
I mean, three Human Centipede movies? 

This version is also referred to as the "uncensored" edition because Shelly later published a revised, more commercial version that added lightning to the monster-making formula, criticized Victor Frankenstein's decision to play God, and made Elizabeth, his fiancée an orphan rather than his cousin. It all sounds pretty tame to twenty-first century ears, and you might question her artistic integrity, but then we live in a world of not one, but three movies about someone sewing people mouth-to-anus to see how long it takes them to die, so we have to ask, whose is the more screwed up culture?

"Suck it Austen!"

-Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly

Ok, but one point one seven million dollars? That's a preposterous sum of money to blow on a book, no matter how rare, right? Sure, but this is basically the first sci-fi novel in English, and calling attention to that fact and to the fact that the genre was invented by an 18 year old woman is pretty cool. And speaking of, this sale does beats a copy of Jane Austen's Emma out for the highest price paid for a book written by a woman record. 

But still, I'm conflicted. I think it's great that something like this makes the news and gets people interested, but it kind of sucks that rare books, or video games, or art so often end up being investments for rich people and not like, in a museum somewhere, or in the hands of researchers or preservationists. Instead it will just be on some rando's rare book shelf so they can show off to their friends, and that's a bummer. 

On the other hand, it's a book, an old one, but still, you know, a book.
I suppose we've reached the limits of what we can learn from the actual,
 physical object, so what the hell, I guess I'd take the money too.