Experience: I found a fortune in a charity shop
I picked up a copy of The Hobbit for 50p and started reading it on the train to work. Then a colleague said it might be worth something
Andy Hewson: ‘I was thinking, even if I make 500 quid, it would still be amazing.’
Andy Hewson
Published onFri 10 Jul 2020 10.00 BST
I work for a charity in central London, and in 2012 there was an animal welfare charity shop near my office called Paws. I’d go in there in my lunch break, mostly to chat to Michelle, the friendly lady who ran the shop. There was always loads of stuff in there: I guess to Michelle it was organised chaos. You’d see the same people come and sit in there every day for a bit of company. It was a real community hub.
I was there one day when a hippy couple started unloading a camper van of hundreds of books. I noticed a copy of The Hobbit. Weirdly, I’d bought a new copy a few weeks previously because I wanted to read it again before the film came out, but I’d lost it. I thought: oh, that’s lucky, I can carry on reading it now. Underneath it was a slightly racy cartoon magazine from the 70s, which I picked up for an artist friend. Michelle said I could have the two for a pound.
It was a nice book. The dust jacket had an illustration of trees and mountains in blue, green and black with Tolkien’s name beneath. I started reading it on the train back and forth to work. I’m not a fast reader so I was still getting through it a month or so later when, as I was leaving work, a woman from our finance team came up to me, having spotted it in my hand. She said it looked old and that I should look into whether it was worth anything.
I ended up down an internet hole looking at first editions of The Hobbit. I learned that there were 1,500 copies printed in the first run in 1937. You can check if you have one by looking for the reference to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson – better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll – printed in notes about the novel on the dust jacket. On the first edition, the name was misspelled as “Dodgeson” and had to be hand-corrected by the publishers. I checked the back and found the crossed-out e.
I was thinking, “This can’t be.” As luck would have it, my girlfriend Jenna was working as an event coordinator at Christie’s at the time, so she put me in contact with a specialist in the books department. I talked him through the details and I remember him saying, “I think you might have a very valuable book on your hands.”
I wrapped it in a pair of pants, put it inside a sandwich bag and took it in to show him. He asked me what I thought it was worth. I’d done my research and said that I was hoping for about £7,000. He agreed that was a good estimate.
I had to wait four months for an auction. It ended up happening a few weeks before The Hobbit film came out, so there was a lot of interest. The auction started at 2.30pm in one of the rooms at Christie’s, with about 40 buyers in attendance. Most of the lots before mine were going for about £2,000. I was thinking, even if I make 500 quid, it would still be amazing. I only paid 50p for it.
So when it came to my book and the auctioneer said, “We’ll start the bidding at £3,000,” I was already thrilled. The bids started going up in jumps of £500: “£4,000, £4,500, £5,000.” My heart was racing. “£6,000, £6,500, £7,000…”
I started to feel a bit nauseous, but was trying to hold it together. The bidding had reached 10 grand before I knew it. It was very quiet in the room. My girlfriend had come to watch with a couple of her colleagues. As it got to £13,000, they were mouthing, “Oh my God!” to me. It finally went for £16,000.
I was 28 at the time; I didn’t have any serious life pressures, but I’d been in debt in the past. All I knew was that I couldn’t piss it up the wall. I’m not the sort of person who has a rich relative to leave them money to fall back on.
My girlfriend persuaded me to put on a photography exhibition – something I’d always wanted to do. Then I spent the rest on a deposit for a flat. I would never have been able to get the money together to buy my own place without it. We’re still living here now.
I carried on going back to Paws until it closed a couple of years ago. I made a small anonymous donation, but never told them what had gone on. I know it sounds strange, but I didn’t want to change the relationship. I just popped in the next lunchtime as if nothing had happened.
• As told to Clare Considine
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George Allen & Unwin Ltd. of London published the first edition of The Hobbit on 21 September 1937 with a print run of 1,500 copies, which sold out by December because of enthusiastic reviews.This first printing was illustrated in black and white by Tolkien, who designed the dust jacket as well. Houghton Mifflin of Boston and New York reset type for an American edition, to be released early in 1938, in which four of the illustrations would be colour plates. Allen & Unwin decided to incorporate the colour illustrations into their second printing, released at the end of 1937. Despite the book's popularity, paper rationing due to World War II and not ending until 1949 meant that the Allen & Unwin edition of the book was often unavailable during this period. Subsequent editions in English were published in 1951, 1966, 1978 and 1995. Numerous English-language editions of The Hobbit have been produced by several publishers. In addition, The Hobbit has been translated into over sixty languages, with more than one published version for some languages. Revisions In December 1937 The Hobbit's publisher, Stanley Unwin, asked Tolkien for a sequel. In response Tolkien provided drafts for The Silmarillion, but the editors rejected them, believing that the public wanted "more about hobbits". Tolkien subsequently began work on The New Hobbit, which would eventually become The Lord of the Rings,[48] a course that would not only change the context of the original story, but lead to substantial changes to the character of Gollum. In the first edition of The Hobbit, Gollum willingly bets his magic ring on the outcome of the riddle-game, and he and Bilbo part amicably. In the second edition edits, to reflect the new concept of the One Ring and its corrupting abilities, Tolkien made Gollum more aggressive towards Bilbo and distraught at losing the ring. The encounter ends with Gollum's curse, "Thief! Thief, Thief, Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it forever!" This presages Gollum's portrayal in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien sent this revised version of the chapter "Riddles in the Dark" to Unwin as an example of the kinds of changes needed to bring the book into conformity with The Lord of the Rings, but he heard nothing back for years. When he was sent galley proofs of a new edition, Tolkien was surprised to find the sample text had been incorporated. In The Lord of the Rings, the original version of the riddle game is explained as a "lie" made up by Bilbo under the harmful influence of the Ring, whereas the revised version contains the "true" account. The revised text became the second edition, published in 1951 in both the UK and the US. Tolkien began a new version in 1960, attempting to adjust the tone of The Hobbit to its sequel. He abandoned the new revision at chapter three after he received criticism that it "just wasn't The Hobbit", implying it had lost much of its light-hearted tone and quick pace. After an unauthorized paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings appeared from Ace Books in 1965, Houghton Mifflin and Ballantine asked Tolkien to refresh the text of The Hobbit to renew the US copyright. This text became the 1966 third edition. Tolkien took the opportunity to align the narrative even more closely to The Lord of the Rings and to cosmological developments from his still unpublished Quenta Silmarillion as it stood at that time. These small edits included, for example, changing the phrase "elves that are now called Gnomes" from the first, and second editions,[56] on page 63, to "High Elves of the West, my kin" in the third edition. Tolkien had used "gnome" in his earlier writing to refer to the second kindred of the High Elves—the Noldor (or "Deep Elves")—thinking "gnome", derived from the Greek gnosis (knowledge), was a good name for the wisest of the elves. However, because of its common denotation of a garden gnome, derived from the 16th-century Paracelsus, Tolkien abandoned the term. He also changed "tomatoes" to "pickles" but retained other anachronisms, such as clocks and tobacco. In The Lord of the Rings, he has Merry explain that tobacco had been brought from the West by the Númenóreans. |
Hobbit first edition with JRR Tolkien's inscription doubles sales record
This article is more than 5 years old
Sold for £137,000, the book with inscription in Old English that talks of ‘marvels and strange beings’ was a gift to one of Tolkien’s students at Leeds
Alison Flood
Published onFri 5 Jun 2015 13.27 BST
A first edition of The Hobbit given by JRR Tolkien to one of his former students in 1937 has more than doubled the world record for a copy of the author’s first novel, selling at auction for £137,000.
The previous record, set in 2008, for a copy of The Hobbit was £50,000, and Sotheby’s in London had expected to sell this copy for between £50,000 and £70,000. But the copy given by Tolkien to Katherine Kilbride, taught by the author at Leeds University in the 1920s, exceeded all expectations.
Tolkien inscribed only a “handful” of presentation copies of The Hobbit on its publication, said Sotheby’s, with CS Lewis also a recipient. Kilbride’s includes an inscription by the author in Old English, identified by John D Rateliff, author of The History of The Hobbit, as an extract from Tolkien’s The Lost Road. This time-travel story, in which the world of Númenor and Middle-earth were linked with the legends of many other times and peoples, was abandoned by the author incomplete.
Tom Shippey’s study of Tolkien’s fiction, The Road to Middle-Earth, cites a similar poem and translates it as: “There is many a thing in the West-regions unknown to me, marvels and strange beings, a land fair and lovely, the homeland of the Elves, and the bliss of the Gods ... ”
Tolkien’s message in Old English to former student Katherine ‘Kitty’ Kilbride. The book sold for a record £137,000 at Sotheby’s in London Photograph: Sotheby's
But the inscription diverges in the third line. According to Professor Susan Irvine at UCL, Tolkien followed “eardgard elfa” or “the homeland of the elves” with “eorclanstanas / on dunscrafum digle scninath”, which she translated as “precious stones / shining secretly in mountain caves”.
Kilbride, who died in 1966, was “an invalid all her life”, according to her nephew, “and was much cheered by [Tolkien’s] chatty letters and cards ... books were given to her as they were published”.
In a letter thanking Tolkien, now kept in Oxford’s Bodleian library, Kilbride tells the author: “What fun you must have had drawing out the maps.”