While at the R.G. Lewis closing down sale today I picked up a full Leica catalogue, with prices, from November 1967. It’s something I’ve wanted to find for a long time, and I am still looking for a 1954 version, right at the start of the M era. Interesting to see all these prices and reflect on how cheap they seem to us now.
An M4 body for £150 14s 8d (don’t forget the eight pence) looks a positive bargain. And with an f/1.4 Summilux lens, the tally is a reasonable-sounding £264 14s 5d. The M3, in 1967 a little long in the tooth, was cheaper at £143 10s 3d, or £143 18s 11d with an f/2.8 Elmar. A snip to 21st Century eyes.
But the prices of both cameras are deceptive. Fifty years ago, £150, for instance, was a huge amount of money when compared with the £25-a-week average wage. As today, the Leica M was an expensive purchase. In income value, £150, equates to £3,400, a figure not a long way from the current price of an M240. As a successful journalist at the time, I never even considered the possibility of a Leica, so outlandish was the prospect of my ever affording one.
That M3 and Elmar, in good condition, would today fetch around £750, some four times its original price. But comparisons like this are deceptive because of the ravages of inflation in the past 50 years.
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My apologies to early readers of this story because two whole paragraphs in the centre somehow got lost. Now reinstated.
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