A rare 1937 first edition of 'The Hobbit' has been discovered in a Bristol house clearance. Photo / Auctioneum
Caitlin Riley, a rare books specialist, was flicking through photographs of tattered volumes from a routine house clean-out this year when she stopped, shocked, at a familiar green cover.
There, between the pictures of faded 20th-century reference books and crumbling veterinary tomes, was The Hobbit, proud and nearly pristine.
Could it be a first edition glinting up from the muck, she wondered, just as Sméagol’s cousin once saw the ring shimmering from a riverbed eons ago?
“I literally couldn’t believe my eyes,” said Riley, a books and works on paper specialist at Auctioneum, an auction house in the English cities of Bath and Bristol.
“How could it possibly be in and amongst all of this rubbish?”
The first edition, first impression of The Hobbit – the literature-reshaping, generation-defining epic by J.R.R. Tolkien that has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide – is up for auction on Auctioneum’s website.
It quickly passed a pre-sale estimate of £10,000 to £12,000 ($22,520 to $27,000). It was up to £19,000 ($42,790) yesterday, with bidding set to close on Thursday.
Such a copy is remarkably rare: only about 1500 were printed in September 1937.
The way the book was found – after decades tucked away in a home library – may have been even more unusual.
“The idea that one sat untouched on a shelf for so many years without anyone realising its value is not just unusual,” Pieter Collier, a Tolkien specialist and bookseller, wrote in an email. “It’s astonishing.”
First editions of The Hobbit have surfaced before and can prove very valuable at auction.
One copy, given by Tolkien to a student, sold for £137,000 ($308,525) in an auction in 2015. Another sold for £60,000.
But few are in as good condition as the one in Bristol, said Oliver Bayliss, the owner of Bayliss Rare Books in London, who thinks it could fetch more than £50,000.
The Hobbit, which was among the tales Tolkien originally spun for his family, was first sold as a children’s book.
As such, Bayliss said, most other first-edition copies “have been through it all – missing pages, kids’ doodles from when it was left on the kitchen table, maybe even a trip through the washing machine once or twice”.
Such a “fresh-to-market” specimen is unusual, he said. “As rare as Smaug’s treasure, frankly.”
Riley barely dared to hope that it was a real copy when she first saw it about two months ago.
Her company had been invited to the home of a person who had died recently in Bristol, to appraise the value of the home’s contents. At first, Riley said, little jumped out: “Stuff that we could sell, but it’s nothing that even touches three figures, let alone five”.
Then there was that copy of The Hobbit.
And although at first she hardly dared to dream that it was real, it all checked out.
There was the title page, with no earlier listed printings. There were the black-and-white illustrations, the originals drawn by Tolkien. The publisher commissioned colour only in later editions, she said, once The Hobbit started to sell.
It was real.
She went to her desk, she said, and cried. “To be able to handle and sell one,” she said, “and for it to come from somewhere so completely unsuspecting? It honestly feels like a miracle.”
The book, a fine get for a wealthy collector, may have had a lonely life on its shelf.
A first edition copy in such good condition “either had one very careful reader – or no readers at all”, said John Garth, the author of The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien and the Great War.
Riley knows little about the person who owned the book most recently: the clean-out was overseen by an executor, she said, and she does not know any family members of the person who died.
She does know that the book came from the library of the Priestley family, who had ties to the University of Oxford, where Tolkien was a professor, and who had corresponded with Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis, who also taught at Oxford.
It is possible, she said, that the original owners knew Tolkien, perhaps “through C.S. Lewis and through them running in the same circles”.
Even if the book had not wandered far, it has been found. And on a Middle-earth time scale, a mere nine decades is laughably short.
“You could think of it like a window into the past,” Garth said. “But frankly, the real window to the past is what Tolkien wrote.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Amelia Nierenberg
Photographs by: Auctioneum
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