AN unbroken Wisden Cricketers' Almanack set from the first year 1864 to 1984 has been auctioned at Bonhams in London this week for £90,000, well above the expected price.

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The books were handsomely bound and offered in fine condition as the top lot. Other items attracting big bids included a revised tyupescript for Ian Fleming's James Bond novel Diamonds Are Forever , which went for £62,400, a unique Jacobean play, for £84,000, and papers relating to the life of the revolutionary Thomas Paine, for £86,400.

Wisden is established as the most famous sports reference work ever published, founded in 1864 by the cricketer John Wisden as a competitor to Fred Lillywhite's The Guide to Cricketers . There have been only 15 different editors in its 140 years.

Though the Bonhams almanacks is short of a complete set, the price looks good value because the remaining 25 books can be acquired easily enough. A full set was sold at auction by Graham Budd at Sotheby's for £120,000 in 2006. The following year a price of £144,000 was apparently achieved at auction, the highest on record. Certainly early gaps can be expensive to fill. For example the year 1896 is notoriously rare, once fetching £24,160 in 2007 as an original hardback with surface wear.

The most valuable single cricket auction item must be Albert Chevallier Tayler's oil painting of Kent versus Lancashire in 1906, which Kent sold for £600,000 in 2006.

Whether James Bond was interested in cricket, one cannot be sure, but Fleming’s typescript became the target of enthusiastic bidding, fetching more than double the estimate. The Bonhams auctioneer described Lot 42 as "peppered throughout with authorial tweaks, written in Fleming's characteristic blue ballpoint."

Bonhams added: "Many taughten the plot, while some are gloriously inconsequential (to the untrained eye at least): a telephone number, for example, gets altered from Wisconsin 9.00456 to Wisconsin 7.3697. When Bond checks himself into the Hotel Astor it was originally 'in front of an elderly woman'; now it is 'before a hatchet-faced woman with a bosom like a sandbag'.

"Or, at page 88, 'too many expense-account customers' becomes 'too much expense-account aristocracy'. While most pages contain one or two alterations, more substantial additions appear in eight places. Every now and then the nagging voice of the publisher's reader can be heard, saying at one point, but surely the world's diamond centre is Amsterdam?"