In a powerful power adjusted for Middle-earth, a rare first edition of 1937 of the epic novel by Jrr Tolkien, The Hobbit, was discovered in a southwest house of England and sold at auction for a record of £ 43,000 ($ 57,000).
Bought by a private collector in the United Kingdom, the book is one of the 1,500 original copies of the Fantastic Roman founder of the British author who was published in 1937.
Among these, only “a few hundred are supposed to stay”, according to the auction house, which discovered the book on a library in a house in Bristol.
Tenderers from around the world have increased the price by more than four times what the auction house was waiting for the manuscript.
“It is a wonderful result for a very special book,” said Caitlin Riley, specialist in rare books from his auctions.
“The surviving books of the initial print are now considered as some of the most sought -after books in modern literature,” Auctioneum said in a press release.
The auctions found the book during an authorization from the routine house after the death of its owner.
“No one knew it was there,” said Riley. “It was just an ordinary library.”
“It was clearly an early hobbit at first glance, so I just removed it and I started crossing it, without ever expecting it to be a real first edition,” she said.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” she added, calling her “unimaginably rare find”.
The copy is linked in a light green fabric and has rare black and white illustrations by Tolkien, who created his medium-loved universe on the ground when he was a professor at the University of Oxford.
The book was transmitted to the Hubert Priestley family library, a botanist linked to the university.
“It is likely that the two men knew each other,” said auction, who said that Priestley and Tolkien shared mutual correspondence with the author CS Lewis, who was also in Oxford.
“The Hobbit”, followed by the epic series “The Lord of the Rings”, sold more than 100 million copies worldwide.
The sagas were transformed into a success of successful films in the 2000s.
A first edition of “The Hobbit” with a handwritten note to Elvish by the author sold for £ 137,000 at Sotheby’s in June 2015.
