A rare first edition of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, found during a house clearance, has been sold at auction for £43,000 (approx. $57,000).
The book is one of 1,500 original copies of the fantasy novel that were published in 1937 and was bought by a private collector in the UK.
According to the auction house Auctioneum, which discovered the novel without a dust cover on a bookcase at a home in Bristol, out of the original, only "a few hundred are believed to still remain."
Bidders from around the world drove the price up by more than four times what the auction house expected. Caitlin Riley, Auctioneum's rare books specialist, noted, "It's a wonderful result for a very special book."
Riley added, ""Nobody knew it was there. It was just a run-of-the-mill bookcase. It was clearly an early Hobbit at first glance, so I just pulled it out and began to flick through it, never expecting it to be a true first edition."
The copy is bound in light green cloth and features black-and-white illustrations by Tolkien, who created his magical universe while being a professor at the University of Oxford.
Moreover, the book was passed down in the family library of Hubert Priestley, a botanist connected to the university and the brother of the Antarctic explorer and geologist Sir Raymond Edward Priestley.
The Hobbit, which was followed by The Lord of the Rings, has sold more than 100 million copies and was adapted into a film trilogy in the 2010s.
Notably, a first edition of The Hobbit with a handwritten note by Tolkien in Elvish, a family of fictional languages, was sold for £137,000 at Sotheby's in 2015.
