having just spent days painting birds in mexico i found this book rather curious and desirable. if only i had 9 million dollars to spare, that is. a rare copy of john james audubon’s “birds of america” is heading to the auction block and is expected to fetch between $6.2 and $9.2 million. billed as the world’s most expensive book, it is one of only 119 copies in existence. the 2-by-3-foot tome consists of 435 hand-colored prints of Audubon’s famous illustrations. it comes, of course, from the collection of a british baron who died in 1955. sotheby’s, which will hold the auction in december 2010, has 8.8 million reasons to believe the audubon book will fetch a fortune. that’s how many dollars a copy sold for at a christies’s auction in just 10 years ago! wow! by uh