And it’s the clipped variant too…

The market has definitely moved on these over the past decade. Here is a chart (and data) from eBay auctions we've noted on TolkienGuide, plus the two purchases mentioned in the thread above - in fact, it seems like perhaps northman bought his on eBay and we noted it there? Not a big deal to the trend. I put "June 1" for the two mentioned purchases in their respective years, just to have a full date for the plot.

As always - please note for eBay "Buy-it-Now" results - they report no longer adjust, if an offer was made and accepted. Only the original list price is known (except to the buyer and the seller), so some of these data points could be higher that what was actually paid - including the most recent BIN purchase this month.

And we can see from this data, that they are scarce but not as scarce as some would think. With an average of 2 or 2.5 coming to market every year.

Mr. Underhill wrote:

And we can see from this data, that they are scarce but not as scarce as some would think. With an average of 2 or 2.5 coming to market every year.

I think mine was the cheapest data point in there! Note it was $118.50 according to my records, so a little bit more than I recalled (damn imperfect memory). 27/03/2016.

Thanks The late Stu - I've adjusted your entry, and after a comb through the discussion forums, added a few more listings (auction house, abebooks, amazon marketplace) that we discussed. Some outliers (as always).

Here is the discussion for that very first auction listing in 2012 (it was eyebrow raising at that time!)