Like word of mouth, only instant, and worldwide.

One of the debatable effects of technology is the creation of trendy rare books, viz:

The actor John Lithgow has prompted a surge of interest in an out-of-print book of short stories first published in 1939, after featuring it in his new Broadway show.

Stories By Heart sees Lithgow read aloud, and then act out, tales from British author W Somerset Maugham’s 1939 anthology Tellers of Tales. The book has been out of print for decades – hardcover copies are currently listed online for anywhere between £400 in the UK and more than $1,000 (£720) in the US – but used bookseller Abebooks has reported it has been inundated with demand for the title this week, selling all of the 24 copies it had listed in just the last seven days, for between $8 and $120.

Abebooks said that it could have sold hundreds more had they been available. “Only a print-on-demand version of Maugham’s collection of stories is now available. Due to the book’s age and obscurity, it’s likely that only a small number of original copies still exist,” said spokesman Richard Davies (Davies was a Rare Book Cafe guest in 2017).

Edited by Maugham, Tellers of Tales is a 1,500-page compendium of stories by 96 authors and includes short works by the likes of Christopher Isherwood, Saki, Leo Tolstoy and Gustave Flaubert.

Lithgow picked Maugham’s book for his show because his father, Arthur Lithgow, used to read it to him as a child. The Third Rock from the Sun actor told PBS: “We would pick the stories, and he would read them out loud, performing all the parts full-out. When I hold it in my hands now, my father comes back. I try to recreate the sort of period of discovery that I went through as a boy with my siblings, just listening to my father read great stories. It was probably the closest we ever felt to my father … bedtime stories with this big, fat book.”

Rolling Stones gitarist Keith Richard created another, earlier rage in 2015, The Guardian reported:

An obscure collection of short stories that sees a one-legged sailor wax lyrical on the various ways in which he might have lost his limb has become the most searched-for title on books marketplace Abebooks, following a tip from Keith Richards.

The Rolling Stones guitarist, upon whom Johnny Depp loosely based his drunk pirate Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, picked James Norman Hall’s story collection Doctor Dogbody’s Leg as his book of choice when he appeared on Desert Island Discs. Published in 1940 and out of print, the book’s author is better known for the novel Mutiny on the Bounty, which he co-wrote with Charles Nordhoff.

Doctor Dogbody’s Leg is set in a Portsmouth tavern called the Cheerful Tortoise, where a Royal Navy surgeon tells a series of stories about how he lost his leg during the Napoleonic wars.

“I chose it basically because it’s a collection of stories about this guy. He’s a sailor, 18th century, Portsmouth harbour, but he’s got one leg. And every time he turns up at the table he has a different story about how he lost it. And they’re all plausible as well,” Richards told Kirsty Young on 25 October.

Abebooks spokesman Richard Davies said the site had been “steadily selling copies ever since”. “We’re down to the last 10 now,” he said, with the book the most searched-for title on AbeBooks.co.uk, and the most expensive copy to sell so far being a signed 1940 edition for £100.

“I would love to hear this collection of stories as an audiobook with Richards doing the narration. That would be fun. Perhaps the book could also be a Johnny Depp movie?” wrote Davies on Abebooks’s blog, where he praised the book and said that its author was a “remarkable person”.

A listener who wished to remain anonymous said she had attempted to buy a copy as a christmas present for her husband, a huge Keith Richards fan, minutes after the broadcast. “As I was searching for a copy online the price kept going up and up as so many other people were obviously doing the same thing,” she said. “I ended up paying £35 for it.”