A rare copy of The Guardian containing a printing error fetched a record £250,000 at auction yesterday. Some 20,000 copies of the paper were printed in 1992 before the mistake was noticed. Most of the defective copies were immediately pulped but a small number found their way into the hands of collectors.
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.