The first edition of Tolkien's The Hobbit, published in 1937, was found without its dust jacket on a shelf in a house in Bristol and sold at auction for £43,000

The first edition of Tolkien's The Hobbit, published in 1937, was found without its dust jacket on a shelf in a house in Bristol and sold at auction for £43,000. It is one of 1,500 original copies, of which only a few hundred survive. The book belonged to the family of Hubert Priestley, a scholar connected with Oxford. According to the auction house's specialists, Priestley may have been acquainted with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. The copy, in a green binding and with illustrations by Tolkien, aroused great interest among collectors. In 2015 a similar copy, signed by the author, was sold for £137,000.