<figure id="attachment_3129282" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3129282" style="width: 1600px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-3129282 size-full" src="https://media.freemalaysiatoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/a62744b1-lifestyle-hobbit-emel-pic-070825.webp" alt="" width="1600" height="1000" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-3129282" class="wp-caption-text">This first edition of &#8216;The Hobbit&#8217; was discovered on a bookcase during a routine house clearance in Bristol, UK. (Auctioneum pic)</figcaption></figure>
LONDON: A rare first edition of J R R Tolkien&#8217;s &#8220;The Hobbit&#8221; sold for £43,000 (RM243,000) at auction on Wednesday, after it was found during a house clearance in southwest England.
Purchased by a private collector in the United Kingdom, the book is one of 1,500 original copies of the British author&#8217;s seminal fantasy novel that were published in 1937.
Of those, only &#8220;a few hundred are believed to still remain&#8221;, according to the auction house 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.
&#8220;It&#8217;s a wonderful result, for a very special book,&#8221; said Auctioneum rare-books specialist Caitlin Riley.
&#8220;The surviving books from the initial print run are now considered some of the most sought-after books in modern literature.&#8221;
Auctioneum unearthed the book during a routine house clearance after its owner passed away.
&#8220;Nobody knew it was there,&#8221; Riley said. &#8220;It was just a run-of-the-mill bookcase. It was clearly an early &#8216;Hobbit&#8217; at first glance, so I just pulled it out and began to flick through it, never expecting it to be a true first edition.
&#8220;I couldn&#8217;t believe my eyes,&#8221; she added, calling it an &#8220;unimaginably rare find&#8221;.
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.
The book was passed down in the family library of Hubert Priestley, a botanist connected to the university.
&#8220;It is likely that both men knew each other,&#8221; according to Auctioneum, which said Priestley and Tolkien shared mutual correspondence with author C S Lewis, who was also at Oxford.
&#8220;The Hobbit&#8221;, which was followed by the epic series &#8220;The Lord of the Rings&#8221;, has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. The sagas were turned into a hit movie franchise in the 2000s.
In June 2015, a first edition of &#8220;The Hobbit&#8221; with a handwritten note in Elvish by the author sold for £137,000 at Sotheby&#8217;s.

MatchPoint Times

Rare first edition of ‘The Hobbit’ sells for £43,000 at auction

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

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