I’ve had a few questions about the engagement diaries, so I’m adding a bit of information about these and a few pics here as well. Very confusingly, a couple of completely different titles were released with the same ISBN, namely Evil Under the Sun(common) and The Harlequin Tea Set (very rare). I have seen complete sets of 101 or more volumes sell in excess of $1500, but these high prices are usually due to the presence of all the rare variants which would otherwise be difficult and time-consuming to track down.Ī couple of volumes are hard to find if you shop online because they were released with different US and UK titles using the same ISBN, including The Sittaford Mystery/ Murder at Hazelmoor, and There is a Tide… / Taken at the Flood. However, the later publications (those published from 1992 onwards) are much less common, with a few truly rare volumes commanding prices of $100 plus.

Most of the volumes in this series are readily available second-hand, so they can be obtained fairy cheaply from around $3 to $20 or so each (depending on condition) if you are interested in collecting a set. Which books are the rarest (and what are they worth)? If you want to collect all the different titles, then you are looking for at least 101 books, or around 125 if you include all the variants including re-releases, the bookends and the numerous engagement diaries that were released in series binding between 1989 to 1999. If you want a copy of every different book, then you would be looking at 88 volumes. If you want the original series, it’s 80 volumes. So it depends how you define ‘complete’ to get the exact number of books in the series. Many early volumes in the series had multiple printings (at least 15 in some cases), and there are also a few variants in the titles and authors for these editions. The covers of the second set have the Bantam name and logo on the spine, but different information on the copyright page of the books. The later titles included 7 new volumes, 13 books that were renamed under their UK title variants, and several re-releases of previously published titles. A second and third set of 18 titles were published by Literary Express between 1992 to 2000, and Bookspan during the last few months of 2000.

The first set of 81 volumes was published by Bantam between 1983 to 1990. How many books are there in the complete series?

The hollow by agatha christie