A rare 1937 first edition of The Hobbit has been discovered in a Bristol house clearance. Photo / Auctioneum
A rare 1937 first edition of The Hobbit has been discovered in a Bristol house clearance. Photo / Auctioneum
A rare first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit has sold for £43,000 ($97,000) at auction, after it was found during a house clearance in southwest England.
Purchased by a private collector in the United Kingdom, the book is one of 1500 original copies of the British author’s seminal fantasynovel 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 book 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 for the manuscript.
“It’s a wonderful result, for a very special book,” said Auctioneum rare books specialist Caitlin Riley.
“The surviving books from the initial print run are now considered some of the most sought-after books in modern literature,” Auctioneum said in a statement.
Only 1500 first impression copies of The Hobbit were printed. Photo / Auctioneum
“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,” she said.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” she added, calling it an “unimaginably rare find”.
The copy is bound in light green cloth and features rare black-and-white illustrations by Tolkien, who created his beloved Middle-earth setting while he was 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.
It is likely that the men knew each other, according to Auctioneum, which said Priestley and Tolkien shared mutual correspondence with author C.S. Lewis, who was also at Oxford.
The Hobbit, which was followed by the epic series The Lord of the Rings, has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide.
The sagas were turned into a hit movie franchise in the 2000s.
A first edition of The Hobbit with a handwritten note in Elvish by the author sold for £137,000 ($308,402) at Sotheby’s in June 2015.
