A first edition of The Hobbit is set to sell for thousands at auction – after being discovered during a routine house clearance.<\/p>\n
The copy of JRR Tolkien’s 1937 book was discovered on a bookcase at a home in Bristol. It is one of only 1,500 copies initially printed in September 1937.<\/p>\n
It is expected to fetch more than \u00a310,000 when it goes under the hammer at Auctioneum in Bath on 6 August.<\/p>\n
Caitlin Riley, book specialist at the Auctioneum, said: “It’s always been highly collectible. For nobody to have in the last 60 years noticed, it blows my mind. It was such a huge surprise for us to find.”<\/p>\n
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, is a children’s fantasy novel and one of the best-selling books of all time, with more than 100 million copies sold.<\/p>\n
The story is set in the fantasy world Middle-earth and follows the hobbit Bilbo Baggins on a quest to find treasure.<\/p>\n
Ms Riley said it had been like finding “a diamond in amongst everything else”.<\/p>\n
“We couldn’t believe our eyes,” she said. “The majority of examples you do see come to the market are a bit tattered and tired looking. <\/p>\n
“With this one, nobody’s opened it, nobody’s touched it, so it was just so exciting.”<\/p>\n
The edition also includes rare drawings by Tolkien himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A first edition of The Hobbit is set to sell for thousands at auction – after being discovered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-38815","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}