The actor John Lithgow has prompted a surge of interest in an out-of-print book of short stories first published in 1939, after featuring it in his new Broadway show.

Stories By Heart sees Lithgow read aloud, and then act out, tales from British author W Somerset Maugham’s 1939 anthology Tellers of Tales. The book has been out of print for decades – hardcover copies are currently listed online for anywhere between £400 in the UK and more than $1,000 (£720) in the US – but used bookseller Abebooks has reported it has been inundated with demand for the title this week, selling all of the 24 copies it had listed in just the last seven days, for between $8 and $120.

Abebooks said that it could have sold hundreds more had they been available. “Only a print-on-demand version of Maugham’s collection of stories is now available. Due to the book’s age and obscurity, it’s likely that only a small number of original copies still exist,” said spokesman Richard Davies.

Edited by Maugham, Tellers of Tales is a 1,500-page compendium of stories by 96 authors and includes short works by the likes of Christopher Isherwood, Saki, Leo Tolstoy and Gustave Flaubert.

Lithgow picked Maugham’s book for his show because his father, Arthur Lithgow, used to read it to him as a child. The Third Rock from the Sun actor told PBS: “We would pick the stories, and he would read them out loud, performing all the parts full-out. When I hold it in my hands now, my father comes back. I try to recreate the sort of period of discovery that I went through as a boy with my siblings, just listening to my father read great stories. It was probably the closest we ever felt to my father … bedtime stories with this big, fat book.”