{"id":4262,"date":"2025-08-07T01:17:38","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T01:17:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/rare-copy-of-the-hobbit-fetches-record-43000-after-turning-up-in-uk-home\/"},"modified":"2025-08-07T01:17:38","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T01:17:38","slug":"rare-copy-of-the-hobbit-fetches-record-43000-after-turning-up-in-uk-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/rare-copy-of-the-hobbit-fetches-record-43000-after-turning-up-in-uk-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Rare copy of The Hobbit fetches record \u00a343,000 after turning up in UK home"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
The first edition of The Hobbit from 1937, inscribed in Old English by JRR Tolkien as a gift to one of his first students at Leeds University. — Sotheby’s\/File<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Tucked away in the quiet corners of a house in southwest England, a rare first edition of JRR Tolkien’s book, The Hobbit, discovered during a routine house clearance, has fetched a staggering £43,000 ($57,000) at an auction.<\/p>\n

Purchased by a private collector in the United Kingdom, the book is one of 1,500 original copies of the British author’s seminal fantasy novel that were published in 1937.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Bidders from around the world drove the price up by more than four times what the auction house expected for the manuscript.<\/p>\n

“It’s a wonderful result, for a very special book,” said Auctioneum rare books specialist Caitlin Riley.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

News :<\/span><div>12 weeks' jail for school IT support technician who took upskirt videos of teachers<\/div><\/span><\/a><\/div>

Auctioneum unearthed the book during a routine house clearance after its owner passed away.<\/p>\n

“Nobody knew it was there,” Riley said. “It was just a run-of-the-mill bookcase.”<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

“I couldn´t believe my eyes,” she added, calling it an “unimaginably rare find”.<\/p>\n

The copy is bound in light green cloth and features rare black-and-white illustrations by Tolkien, who created his beloved Middle-earth universe while he was a professor at the University of Oxford.<\/p>\n

The book was passed down in the family library of Hubert Priestley, a botanist connected to the university.<\/p>\n

News :<\/span>Migrant acquitted in first trial over US border military zones<\/span><\/a><\/div>

“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.<\/p>\n

“The Hobbit”, which was followed by the epic series “The Lord of the Rings”, has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide.<\/p>\n

The sagas were turned into a hit movie franchise in the 2000s.<\/p>\n

A first edition of “The Hobbit” with a handwritten note in Elvish by the author sold for £137,000 at Sotheby’s in June 2015.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Rare copy of The Hobbit fetches record £43,000 after turning up in UK home<\/sub><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first edition of The Hobbit from 1937, inscribed in Old English by JRR Tolkien as a gift to one of his first students at Leeds University. — Sotheby’s\/File Tucked away in the quiet corners of a house in southwest England, a rare first edition of JRR Tolkien’s book, The Hobbit, discovered during a routine…<\/p>\n

Read More “Rare copy of The Hobbit fetches record \u00a343,000 after turning up in UK home”<\/span> »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4263,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}