Miss World Philippines 2018 Katarina Rodriguez is a self-confessed bookworm and she has proven that she will go through anything to satisfy her obsession with books.
Rodriguez would usually express her love for books by uploading photos of her collection of reading materials on social media.
Rodriguez said that she likes to collect classic and antique books and that she has so much of them that she is building her own library at her house.
But her most extravagant purchase because of her love for books would have to be when she bought a Peter Pan book that has been in existence for over a century.
For her birthday, Rodriguez said that she planned on buying herself a designer bag but ended up purchasing a book that is 111 years old when she came across an antique bookstore on the Upper East Side.
“I had to go inside even just to look around for 30 minutes or so. Of course I got curious as to what books they had and from how long ago, and I started asking if I could see these century old copies of certain classics,” she said.
She said that the book is so rare that there are only 75 copies of it in the world.
“It’s my first collector’s book that I have purchased for myself and it is a hundred and eleven years old and it is my favorite book ever. Yeah, books over bags any day,” she said.
While the book’s antiquity is shocking on its own, Rodriguez also said that it cost nearly five times the price of the designer bag she wanted to buy in the first place.
The Filipino beauty queen did not mention the bag she was going to buy but let us assume that it was supposed to be Gucci since it is one of the brands that is frequently seen on her Instagram account.
The average cost of a Gucci shoulder bag is around $2,000 or around P106,000 based on current exchange rates. Multiply that by five and it will be a staggering $10,000 or around P530,000.
