Rare pristine first edition of The Hobbit, found during house clean-out, auctioned for $73,000

LONDON – A rare first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit sold for £43,000 (S$73,000) at auction on Aug 6, after it was found during a house clearance in southwest England.

Purchased by a private collector in Britain, the book is one of 1,500 original copies of the British author’s seminal fantasy novel that were published in 1937.

Of those, only “a few hundred are believed to still remain”, according to 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.

She was flicking through photographs of tattered volumes from a routine house clean-out in Bristol in 2025 when she stopped 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.

“I literally couldn’t believe my eyes,” said Ms Riley. “How could it possibly be in and among all of this rubbish?”

The first edition, first impression of The Hobbit – the literature-reshaping, generation-defining epic by Tolkien - has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide.

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,” Mr Pieter Collier, a Tolkien specialist and bookseller. “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 in an auction in 2015. Another sold for £60,000.

But few are in as good condition as the one in Bristol, said Mr Oliver Bayliss, the owner of Bayliss Rare Books in London.

Ms 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, English writer 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”. NYTIMES, AFP