$7,500 For A Lamborghini Miura…Book?

The Lamborghini Miura is often touted as the first modern supercar. It’s arguably the most beautiful, and certainly one of the most expensive.

Though priced at $19,250 when introduced in 1967 (the equivalent of $157,000 today), original Miuras now regularly change hands for over $1.5 million (£1.1m).

And it seems you even need to be loaded just to read about them. Hortons Books in the UK is selling a copy of ‘The Lamborghini Miura’ and the asking price is a jaw-dropping £5500, which equates to $7500.

That’s a serious markup on the £250 ($340) it would have cost new, which to most of us already probably seems like a bundle of cash for a book about a car. And just to underline the apparent absurdity of a £5,500 car book, the same page on Horton’s website lists an entirely different Miura book for £85 ($115).

Related: Marcello Gandini Talks About His Most Famous Creation, The Lamborghini Countach

But this is no ordinary book, and getting hold of one when they were first published was near impossible. It was written by classic car expert Simon Kidston, who cut his teeth working at Europe’s top auction houses and now runs his own firm helping the world’s wealthy buy and sell blue-chip automobiles.

It packs almost two decades of research into 454 pages, including interviews with all the key men involved in the Miura story, and was limited to 762 copies, a nod to the number of Miuras originally sold.

The book became a must-have text for Miura owners and fans, and sold out quickly. And while Hortons’ price might seem outrageous, it’s not as unrealistic as it might appear. The most expensive of three copies previously sold on the Collecting Cars auction website changed hands for £4,900 ($6,700) in April this year.

It sounds like a great read, and damn, do we wish we’d bought a couple of copies when they were still available and punted them on to fund an actual car after reading them. But while ‘The Lamborghini Miura’ has sold out, its companion book, ‘The Miura Register’ is still available to order.

Detailing the spec of each of the 762 cars, and, thanks to some serious detective work, even the history of each after it left Lamborghini, ‘The Miura Register’ sounds like a Lambo geek’s dream come true. And at £350 ($480) through The Miura Book website, you’d probably feel comfortable actually leafing through the pages without having to don your gloves and tweezers first.