Clara Bullock
BBC News, Somerset
Chloe Harcombe
BBC News, West of England
Book found during clear-out fetches £43,000 at auction
An “astonishingly rare” first edition of The Hobbit has sold for a “record-breaking” £43,000 at auction.
The copy of JRR Tolkien’s novel is one of only 1,500 copies that were printed in 1937. It was discovered without a dustcover on a bookcase during a home clearance in Bristol.
It was sold to a private collector in the UK through an online auction at Auctioneum in Bath, Somerset, earlier.
Caitlin Riley, the book specialist from the auction house, said: “It’s the quintessential auction story. Everyone dreams of finding a rare item hidden in plain sight, and here we are.”
The book, which was only expected to fetch between £10,000-£12,000 at auction, attracted hundreds of bidders from all over the world.
Ms Riley said the book is in “absolutely beautiful condition” and she believed it sold for a record price for a first edition without a dustcover.
“House clearances can be tricky, stressful and troublesome… this could have so easily been sent to landfill, or disposed of by someone who didn’t realise it was there,” she added.
The book was found at a property in Bristol
The book came from the family library of Hubert Priestley who was a famous botanist in the 1930s and brother to the Antarctic explorer and geologist, Sir Raymond Edward Priestley.
Priestley had strong connections to the University of Oxford where Tolkien stood as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College.
Both men knew fellow author C.S. Lewis and it is likely that they knew each other.
“It’s the connection to Tolkien and the important provenance that makes this book so special. It’s not just any first edition; it belonged to someone who very likely called Tolkien an acquaintance,” Ms Riley said.
She added it was astonishingly rare to find a first edition in such good condition.
“Being a children’s book, most of them have seen children’s hands, children’s colouring pens in some cases, so to have one that appears to be completely unread and never enjoyed is really, really astonishingly rare,” she said.
Auctioneum
Only 1,500 copies of the book were printed in 1937
The Hobbit is one of the most successful children’s novels, with more than 100 million copies sold.
The story is set in the fantasy world Middle-earth and follows the hobbit Bilbo Baggins on a quest to find treasure.
The rare edition that was sold also includes rare drawings by Tolkien himself.
