For the handsome price of �?�13,950 per copy, readers of the Daily Telegraph can purchase a reproduction of the book. Of 1,480 copies that were made of the ancient manuscript in 1990, only dozens remain for sale and they are now on offer in the newspaper from a British company that specialises in the reproduction of old tomes.

"The demand has been simply amazing, " said Henrietta Pearson of Alecto Publications, which has also sold reproductions of the Domesday Book, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Oxford Bible. "This is one of the best-selling facsimiles ever and we are now down to less than 80 copies. It's an incredibly successful publication."

The Book of Kells manuscript, which is said to have eclipsed all other artistic and cultural achievements of the middle ages, was created around 800 AD by the monks of Kells, Co Meath. In order to glorify the life of Christ, the monks wrote out the four gospels in Latin and decorated almost all of the 680 pages with intricate designs.

The Book of Kells is a big tourist attraction for Trinity College, Dublin, where it has rested since the mid-17th century, but in the last hundred years the library has been inundated with requests by scholars wanting direct access to the book. Finally, in 1986, a Swiss publishing firm, Verlag Von Luzern, was given permission to photograph the book in its entirety and make a limited edition of 1,480 numbered facsimile copies.

"The reasons were to enable a wider audience to be able to appreciate the manuscript and to help minimise handling of the original, " said Robin Adams, head librarian at Trinity.

The process took several trips back and forth and was painstakingly done, involving a process of gentle suction to straighten each page without touching it. In 1990, the first facsimile copies were released and most were bought by museums and libraries around the world. However, the lengthy hand-binding process has meant that the final editions are only becoming available now. Alecto Editions has got its hands on these last editions and say they are exact replicas of the real thing.

"The colours exactly match the real Book of Kells and the manuscript paper has the same texture and cool feeling of an ancient book, " said Pearson.

"Every page has been sewn by hand in the same method the monks would have used and it really is a superior reproduction. The people who buy this book are generally not wealthy, " she added. "People save hard to get a hold of one."