A rare first edition of JRR Tolkien novel The Hobbit has sold for a record-breaking £43,000 at auction. It is one of only 1,500 copies printed in 1937, and was discovered without its original dustcover on a bookcase during a home clearance in Bristol.
Caitlin Riley, book specialist from Bath auction house Auctioneum, said: “It’s the quintessential auction story. Everyone dreams of finding a rare item hidden in plain sight, and here we are.”
The estimate for the book at auction was £10,000-£12,000, but it attracted hundreds of bidders from all over the world. The selling price is believed to be a record for a first edition without a dustcover, though Ms Riley said the book is in “absolutely beautiful condition”. “House clearances can be tricky, stressful and troublesome” she added – “… this could have so easily been sent to landfill, or disposed of by someone who didn’t realise it was there.”
Priestley
The book came from the family library of Hubert Priestley, famous 1930s botanist and brother to the Antarctic explorer and geologist, Sir Raymond Edward Priestley. The Priestleys both 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 Priestleys knew fellow author C.S. Lewis, a member of Tolkien’s circle The Inklings.
“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,” said Ms Riley, who described it as ” “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.
This edition of the story of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in a quest to find treasure in a fantasy world includes reproductions of Tolkien’s own illustrations. The Hobbit is the forerunner to The Lord of the Rings, the epic fantasy adventure in three parts.
