This rare book, one of 1,500 copies printed in 1937, was sitting without its dust jacket on an ordinary bookshelf.
The book was discovered by the auction house Auctioneum. It is estimated that only a few hundred of these first editions remain today.
The auction house did not expect the book to fetch such a high price. It was stated that collectors worldwide engaged in fierce bidding. Auctioneum's rare books expert Caitlin Riley said:
"A fantastic result for a truly special book. At first glance, it was clear it was an old Hobbit edition, but I never expected it to be a genuine first edition."
The book features a light green cloth binding and black-and-white illustrations by Tolkien himself. Tolkien created this world while working as a professor at Oxford University.
The book came from the family library of botanist Hubert Priestley, brother of the famous Antarctic explorer Sir Raymond Edward Priestley. According to the auction house, among their mutual friends with Tolkien was C.S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia.
Previously sold for £137,000
The Hobbit has sold over 100 million copies worldwide and was adapted into a trilogy of films directed by Peter Jackson in the 2010s. In 2015, another first edition with handwritten notes in the Elvish language by Tolkien sold for £137,000 at Sotheby's.
Despite lacking its dust jacket, this newly found edition is considered one of the most "extraordinarily rare" Tolkien works discovered to date.
