LONDON – Caitlin Riley, a rare books specialist, was flicking through photographs of tattered volumes from a routine house clean-out in Bristol in 2025 when she stopped, shocked, 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 Riley, a books and works on paper specialist at Auctioneum, an auction house in the English cities of Bath and Bristol. “How could it possibly be in and amongst all of this rubbish?”

The first edition, first impression of The Hobbit – the literature-reshaping, generation-defining epic by English writer J.R.R. Tolkien that has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide – is up for auction on Auctioneum’s website.

It quickly passed a presale estimate of 10,000 pounds (S$17,000) to 12,000 pounds, and was up to 19,000 pounds on Aug 4, with bidding set to close Aug 6 evening.

Such a copy is remarkably rare: Only about 1,500 were printed in September 1937. 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,” Pieter Collier, a Tolkien specialist and bookseller, wrote in an email. “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 pounds in an auction in 2015. Another sold for 60,000 pounds. But few are in as good condition as the one in Bristol, said Oliver Bayliss, the owner of Bayliss Rare Books in London, who thinks it could fetch more than 50,000 pounds.

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

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