$30,000 won’t buy you a Ferrari, but it’ll certainly get you a perfectly nice alternative car. Or, a perfectly nice coffee table book — about Ferrari.
That’s right, friends. If you’re just swimming in hundred dollar bills and are looking for ways to spend that hard-earned cash, we may have found you one of the most absurd options yet. Meant to be about as exclusive as Ferraris are themselves, this new retrospective about the luxury car brand will feature a sculptured steel and chrome book stand, as well as an aluminum display case for one of your ultra-limited edition folios. Bot the stand and the case are designed by Marc Newson, and only 250 Art Edition copies of the book will be printed. When taken as a whole, the entire setup is meant to evoke the shapes of a Ferrari 12-cylinder engine.
Titled “Il Fascino Ferrari” and published by Taschen, the book is described as a “massive tome” that offers “unrestricted access to hundreds of photographs from the Ferrari Archives and from private collectors, to reveal the full story behind Ferrari’s protagonists, victories, past, and future.” The book is edited by journalist Pino Allievi, and promises to feature “a complete appendix gathering all of Ferrari’s victories since 1947.” For $30,000, it may just be the closest thing to a Ferrari some of us will be able to afford.
“A project conceived in close collaboration with Ferrari, this massive tome is a veritable collector’s piece,” the publisher writes on its website.
But don’t worry, if $30,000 is just too astronomical of a price tag to fathom, there is a budget option, too. For a mere $6,000, you can get one of the non-Art Editions. There are 1,697 copies of these cheaper books, and 1,947 total books in honor of Ferrari’s birth year of 1947.
Taschen is well known in the collector’s world for its extravagant art books, and to be sure, its collectible editions are often extremely expensive. In fact, if you’re looking for one of the last three remaining XXL editions of “Moon,” (a book about the moon) with photographs and an actual moon rock, you’ll need to be ready to shell out $375,000. Suddenly, $30,000 doesn’t look so bad after all.
The 514-page Ferrari book is authored by Italian automotive historian Pino Allievi, and will be published in October 2018.
