Introducing the vinyls that could pay off your mortgage .

Last week, Mr Martin Shkreli, aka “the most hated man in America”, sold the only copy of Wu Tang Clan’s Once Upon A Time In Shaolin for a pinch over $1m (£740,000). Allow your seething rage towards this real-life troll to be softened by the news that Mr Shkreli paid double that for the record in 2015 and is now in prison. (Unfortunately, his time in the clink is for breaking his bail conditions while awaiting sentencing for fraud, rather than hiking up the price of an AIDS drug by 5,000 per cent.) Not that the price tag on Once Upon A Time In Shaolin – one of the most ballyhooed albums in history – is much more than that of the next record on the list of the most expensive ever sold. In fact, it seems that there are many people out there with Mr Shkreli’s taste for frittering away tens of thousands of dollars on rare vinyl (though thankfully, his other habits are more singular). Scroll down to discover the records that have commanded the highest prices in history. Surprisingly, Boston’s “More Than A Feeling” doesn’t feature.

On 8 December 1980, Mr John Lennon signed a copy of his latest album for a fan outside his home. Hours later, that same fan, Mr Mark Chapman, shot Mr Lennon and killed him. A passer-by later discovered the album in a plant pot and handed it to police, who in turn “gifted” it back to them. It was auctioned for $150,000 (£110,000) in 1999, before being sold again in 2010 for $850,000 (£535,000). It’s now on sale again for $1.5m (£1.2m) through New York memorabilia dealer Moments In Time.

The winning bidder of this 78rpm record was no amateur. Mr John Tefteller is a US record collector and blues superfan, who paid $37,100 (£27,440) for it and estimates his music collection to be worth “millions”. There are only two known releases of “Alcohol And Jake Blues”, a seminal track from the Delta blues genre, and with this 2013 purchase, Mr Tefteller became the owner of both. Why did he need to buy both recordings? “My original copy never sounded real good,” he told Fuse.TV in 2013. “It was in hammered condition.”

In June 1953, an 18-year-old Mr Elvis Presley skipped out of Sun Records’ studios in Memphis to visit his friend Mr Ed Leek and play him his first ever recording: the two-side acetate of “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”. Mr Presley left the record behind and it passed down through the Leek family until 2015, when it was auctioned for $300,000 (£198,400) at Graceland, on what would have been The King’s 80th birthday.

Mr Richard D James, known to most of us as Aphex Twin, worked under the alias of Caustic Window to produce a 15-track eponymous album in 1994. The release was cancelled with only five test presses made. In 2014, one of those records went on sale and was bought by a group of fans via Kickstarter. Investors were rewarded with a digital recording of it, and the original hard-copy record was then sold for $46,300 (£34,240) to Mr Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft and EDM nerd (yes, really).

The Beatles’ recordings have secured some of the highest sales prices in history. Mr Ringo Starr’s first edition of the White Album sold for $790,000 (£522,000) in 2015. A signed copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band went for $290,000 (£191,000) in 2013. And last year, an early release of Yesterday And Today fetched $125,000 (£92,000). The real gem, if it were ever to be sold, is Sir Paul McCartney’s recording of The Quarrymen, the band that went on to form The Beatles.