“Nobody knew it was there,” said Riley in a statement published by the auction house. “It was just a run-of-the-mill bookcase, containing the usual reading and reference books you’d expect to find. 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.”

A rare first edition of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, found during a house clearance, has been sold at auction for £43,000 .The book is one of 1,500 original copies of the fantasy novel that were published in 1937 and was bought by a