‘A first edition Kindle would not normally attract a great deal of interest,’ explained secondhand Kindle dealer Rupert Foster, ‘because there are millions of them. But a slightly foxed Kindle is rare.’

Recently a Kindle (‘slightly creased screen with faint pencil notes in the margins’), was sold on eBay.

The value of a Kindle can depend as much on its content as on its physical condition, according to experts.

‘Recently we were unable to reach the starting price on a Kindle containing 3,500 books because most were Jeffrey Archer novels,’ said a Sotherby’s spokesman.

Last month the secondhand Kindle market was rocked when a Japanese dealer bought a Kindle, said to contain a rare copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, which was later exposed as a clever forgery.

A wealthy Japanese collector of fine furniture bought the sofa, discovered in a neglected state in the front garden of a council house in Barnsley.

A Sotheby’s spokeswoman said: ‘The sofa had been in the garden for some time and was thought to be just another old Chippendale until a council refuse collector recognized the distinctive DFS style. It’s a real find.’

A rusty clapped-out fridge discovered in the same garden and to be auctioned next week is expected to set a new world record for an early Zanussi.

The rare copies had a mistake in the story at the bottom of page 12, about trees. The word ‘government’ was wrongly printed with a capital ‘G’. The defective copies, dubbed the ‘Grauniad Grey’, were initially changing hands for £500, but now, seventeen years later, copies in mint condition are worth a great deal more.

The previous record for a defective newspaper was set in 2007 when an issue of the Financial Times containing ‘stranglewank’ misspelt as two separate words, fetched £200,000.
Fredd