My husband and I did the same thing with Gary Allen’s book. We purchased several at the American Opinion Bookstore in Newport Beach, CA and distributed them keeping one for ourselves.
I never had more than one copy of Atlas Shrugged - that is a HUGE book and I can’t imagine what buying more than one of those would have cost. I received mine as a gift in the ‘60’s and still have it and still pick it up and read it at random...
In hardback it would have been prohibitive. We found it somewhere available in paperback.