Almost everything Seamus Heaney has written is on my shelves, and almost everything by Philip Larkin, too, but I don't have the former's first slim volume, Eleven Poems, printed by Belfast Festival Publications in 1965, or the latter's almost equally slim XX Poems, published by the author himself in 1951. If I did, the Heaney would be worth £500 to me and the Larkin £1,500. Not that I'd sell them, of course, but still . . .In other words, though most books nowadays can be picked up for half nothing in bargain basements soon after they're published, certain first editions by a select number of writers are worth an awful lot of money. And among these writers are some you mightn't think of - Ian Fleming, for instance, whose first Bond novel, Casino Royale, will fetch about £5,500 in its original edition.So what are the criteria? "One thing that helps," says Nicholas Worskett of Christie's auctioneers, "is being dead" - which partly explains why a first edition of D.H.
Lawrence's The Rain-bow sold for £5,175 at Christie's last May.Another thing that helps, according to Mr Worskett, is a first edition with a small print run where the author subsequently became very famous - hence the value of the Heaney and Larkin volumes. "It's all about rarity, condition and desirability," Mr Worskett says.This explains the £1,000 price being asked by second-hand booksellers for the first edition of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, which originally came out in a hardback print run of only five hundred copies - and it explains, too, why a first edition of Martin Amis's The Information, of which hundreds of thousands of copies were printed in its first run, fetches next to nothing.But do most collectors of rare first editions want them for their contents? No, says Mr Worskett: "Collectors have no interest in reading the book. It simply becomes a sacred object to them."And thus the £1,200 recently paid by a Hong Kong collector, not for a particular book, which he already had, but for its dust jacket, which he hadn't. I doubt if my first edition of Archibald Colquhoun's translation of Giuseppe Di Lampedusa's The Leopard is worth much, but anyway I wouldn't part with it for the world - it's a superb translation of one of the great novels of the century, and I've been re-reading it every few years since I was eighteen.I'm not alone in my estimation of its stature, of course, but it's cheering to see it being chosen twice in as many months in the Daily Telegraph's weekly Book of the Century slot - by William Waldegrave, who marvels at its description of "the death of a European culture two millennia or more in age," and by Peter Vansittart for its "cultured riposte to political correctness," querying "conventional notions of social advance and reform". Oh, and through the character of the Prince of Salina it tells a marvellous story, too. Does Frank McCourt, busy working on 'Tis, the sequel to Angela's Ashes, mind the publication of his brother Malachy's autobiography,A Monk Swimming?"Of course I mind," he told Nicci Gerrard in the Observer, "of course it gets to me. He's written about things I'm going to be writing about. I'm a bit pissed off, sure."He hasn't read it yet, though, and won't do so until he has finished his own book. Anyway, "I'm not like him. I'm not interested in the Irish man . . . We are opposites. He was a barman and I was a teacher. He was night and I was day."In publishing terms, the life of Leonard DiCaprio hasn't quite matched the death of Princess Diana, who is the subject of more than fifty books to date, but it's getting there - next month will mark the eleventh breathless biography of the baby-faced American movie star.However, he has a long way to go before catching up with Marilyn Monroe, subject of almost a hundred books, not to mention Elvis, about whom more than 140 tomes have been published. Just thought you'd like to know.English writer John King has an intriguing theory about why fiction from Ireland, Scotland and Wales tends to be less genteel and middle-class than English fiction.Seemingly it's because Celtic working-class culture is more magnanimous towards men who want to write and doesn't automatically dismiss them as sissies. "If you're English and you write something," King says, "you're considered a poof, but if you're Irish, Scottish or Welsh it's more acceptable." Well, it's a point of view.