A forgotten, out-of-print history book from 1929 has sold out across the internet after it was praised by Elon Musk.

The Tesla chief executive and billionaire told Bloomberg on Thursday that he was currently reading a book called Twelve Against the Gods by William Bolitho. “It’s really quite good,” Musk added, sending the price of the now obscure text up from $6.35 (£4.82) on Amazon.com for a secondhand paperback edition, to $99.99, before it sold out at the online retailer. Shortly after, used books marketplace Abebooks reported that it had also sold out, with the 13 copies available quickly snapped up and Bolitho’s book the most sought for on the site all day.

Musk-read … Twelve Against the Gods by William Bolitho. Photograph: Abebooks

Twelve Against the Gods, by former Manchester Guardian correspondent Bolitho, is a series of sketches of the lives of 12 figures from history, including Casanova, Napoleon, Woodrow Wilson and Alexander the Great. It is, runs its description, “intended to elucidate history somewhat, more to illustrate it, to honour without hypocrisy the deeds of men and women whose destiny was larger, if not deeper than our own”.

“We had only 13 copies available at the start of Wednesday and all of them have sold, including a copy for $99. Twelve Against the Gods was easily the top search term on AbeBooks.com yesterday [Thursday]. I am positive we would have sold many more copies if they had been available,” said spokesperson Richard Davies. “When we have less than 15 copies of a particular book then it’s safe to say that it’s pretty obscure. We had not sold a single copy this year until Musk revealed he was reading it.”

Bolitho was born in 1890 and died aged 39, in 1930. He fought during the first world war, where he survived being blown up by a mine and buried alive. After the war, he became the Guardian’s Paris correspondent, where he encountered Ernest Hemingway, at that time a fellow journalist. Hemingway later wrote that he “had a white, lantern-jawed face of the sort that is supposed to haunt you if seen suddenly in a London fog, but on a bright windy day in Paris meeting him on the boulevard wearing a long fur-collared great coat he had the never-far-from-tragic look of a ham Shakespearean actor”.

“None of us thought of him as a genius then and I do not think he thought of himself as one either, being too busy, too intelligent, and, then, too sardonic to go in for being a genius in a city where they were a nickel a dozen and it was much more distinguished to be hard-working,” added Hemingway.

Noël Coward, with whom Bolitho was also friends, wrote of him that “of all the minds I had ever encountered, his, I think, was the richest and most loving”. Coward dedicated his play Post Mortem to Bolitho, who would die two years later of peritonitis.