A rare first edition of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit that was found during a house clearance has sold at auction for a “record-breaking” £43,000.
Bought by a private collector in the UK, the book is one of 1,500 original copies of the seminal fantasy novel that were published in 1937. Of those, only “a few hundred are believed to still remain”, according to the auction house Auctioneum, which discovered the novel without a dust cover on a bookcase at a home in Bristol.
Bidders from around the world drove the price up by more than four times what the auction house expected. Caitlin Riley, Auctioneum’s rare books specialist, said: “It’s a wonderful result, for a very special book.”
Riley added: “Nobody knew it was there. It was just a run-of-the-mill bookcase. It was clearly an early Hobbit at first glance, so I just pulled it out and began to flick through it, never expecting it to be a true first edition.”
The copy is bound in light green cloth and features rare black-and-white illustrations by Tolkien, who created his Middle-earth universe while a professor at the University of Oxford.
The book was passed down in the family library of Hubert Priestley, a botanist connected to the university and the brother of the Antarctic explorer and geologist, Sir Raymond Edward Priestley.
“It is likely that both men knew each other,” according to Auctioneum, which said Priestley and Tolkien shared mutual correspondence with author CS Lewis, who was also at Oxford.
The Hobbit, which was followed by the epic series The Lord of the Rings, has sold more than 100m copies worldwide and was adapted into a film trilogy in the 2000s. A first edition of The Hobbit with a handwritten note by Tolkien in Elvish, a family of fictional languages, sold for £137,000 at Sotheby’s in 2015.
