The highest prices recorded in a Space Exploration sale on July 20 were for video recordings and documents relating to the Apollo 11 mission that featured the first moon landing, but a much earlier, fictional account of a lunar expedition also impressed.

Extracted from Antiques Trade Gazette | Ian McKay

Sold for $32,000 (£25,600) at Sotheby’s New York (25/20/13.9% buyer’s premium) on July 20 was the 1922, US edition of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon – a work that had been first published in New York by Scribner’s almost 50 years earlier but bears what is essentially the same cover illustration.

This copy, however, bears the inscriptions of Apollo 11 lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin and command module pilot Michael Collins, along with those of eight other astronauts who took part in earlier or later Apollo missions.

The most expensive lot in the sale presented three NASA videotape recordings of the moon landing.

Billed as unrestored, unenhanced and unremastered, and as “the sharpest and most accurate surviving video images of man’s first steps on the moon” – with a total running time of close on two and a half hours – they sold at $1.5m (£1.2m).