Find Of The Week
I’m a bit too precious about books, even ones that I do not particularly care for, to throw them away. Someone somewhere may value them and, you just never know, they could be worth something in the right hands.
In 2008 a school in Buckinghamshire was having a clear out prior to an Ofsted inspection and a load of books from the library were dumped in a skip. After all, it would not do for the inspectors to find actual books on the shelves. One of the teachers, though, couldn’t bear to see them all pulped and in a bit of what the Americans call dumpster diving, salvaged a few and put them up in her attic.
It was her son who alerted her to the fact that three of the salvaged books, a hardback edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and two paperback first editions of the same novel might be worth a few bob.
Indeed they are. With an estimated price of £18,000 they are going under the hammer at auction on May 21st at Bishton Hall in Staffordshire. According to auctioneers, Hansons of Derbyshire, only 500 copies of the hardback were printed, 300 of which were sent to schools. They contained a number of errors which were eradicated in subsequent print runs and, to quote an expert, are “as rare as hen’s teeth” and “the holy grail for collectors”.
Quite a find.
