This Bentley book costs £200,000

Bentley is celebrating a big birthday this year. And this is (part of) how it’s doing it. With a book. A really big one, created with “specialist luxury book publisher” Opus, of nine chapters and more than 800 pages.

The Bentley Centenary Book weighs 30kg - as much as a ten-year-old child - and is over metre wide when open. The basic ‘Centenary’ edition is limited to 500 copies and costs £3,000. For that, you get the same kind of leather Bentley uses in its cars (in your choice of colour) for the cover, and a Bentley badge which, again, is like the one the company uses on its cars.

The ‘Mulliner’ edition, which is limited to 100 copies and costs £12,500, adds 20in x 24in portraits of ten iconic Bentleys, and a collection of 56 watercolour paintings. Furthermore, you get a section of front-left tyre taken from the 2003 Le Mans-winning Bentley Speed 8. Buyers can also choose to have their car photographed by Opus and the images included on special pages.

But the big one is the ‘Centenary’ edition, which is adorned with 100 carats of diamonds. Only seven will be made - one for each continent - for £200,000 each. That’s substantially more than, well, many actual Bentleys.

All versions get a foreword by Ralph Lauren, and chapters on such subjects as “Performance, Design, Rarity and Craftsmanship, as well as Innovation and Extraordinary Customers”. The final chapter is written by current CEO Adrian Hallmark.

We think it’s safe to say you won’t be seeing these in your local Waterstones (other high-street bookshops are available).