Unbelievable! Rare Hobbit Book Found During House Clearance Sells for £43,000!

2025-08-07 00:00:29.976

A rare first edition of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit, found during a house clearance, has sold at auction for £43,000. Bought by a private collector in the UK, the book is one of 1,500 original copies published in 1937. Auctioneum, the auction house that discovered the novel, estimates that only a few hundred still exist. The book, found without a dust cover on a bookcase in Bristol, exceeded expectations by more than four times. Caitlin Riley, Auctioneum’s rare books specialist, called the result "wonderful". The copy, bound in light green cloth and featuring Tolkien’s black-and-white illustrations, was part of the family library of Hubert Priestley, a botanist connected to Oxford University and brother of Antarctic explorer Sir Raymond Priestley. Auctioneum suggests Priestley and Tolkien may have known each other through mutual correspondence with C.S. Lewis. The Hobbit, which has sold over 100 million copies and was adapted into a film trilogy, is a highly sought-after collectible. In 2015, a first edition with a Tolkien handwritten note sold for £137,000.