First Edition

The records for JK Rowling’s early work sold at auction keep tumbling, both hardback and paperback

A set of JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings realised a premium-inclusive $250,000 (£187,500) at Heritage Auctions of Dallas.

A rare first edition of Enid Blyton’s first published book, Child Whispers, hammered at £1400 in the Thomson Roddick (20% buyer’s premium) book sale on December 4.

The most important of only 23 known surviving copies of the first – and subsequently withdrawn – June 1865 edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been given jointly to Christ Church Oxford and the Bodleian Libraries.

With the first hardback Philosopher’s Stone at stratospheric sums, the soft cover value is rising steadily

When William Golding (1911-93) wrote his debut novel Lord of the Flies in 1953 it was rejected by nine publishers and damned as ‘rubbish and dull’ before being picked up by Faber & Faber.

A first edition copy of 'The Left Bank and Other Stories' by the Dominican author Jean Rhys (1890-1979) and 'Portrait of New York' by Cecil Beaton (1904-80) were offered together at Ewbank’s (25% buyer’s premium).

While TS Eliot’s poem 'The Waste Land' had appeared in book form in the US in 1922 – and in two magazines the same year – the edition published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in Richmond, Surrey in 1923 was the first in the UK.

A recent rare books sale at Heritage Auctions (25% buyer’s premium) in the US delivered strong performances for a handful of coveted 20th century firsts in dust jackets.

Swann Auction Galleries (25% buyer’s premium) recorded head-turning sales during its series of New York sales in May.

A tiny Oxfam shop in Headington, Oxfordshire, was celebrating after a set of 12 books dropped off by an anonymous donor later sold at Bonhams for £13,000 (£16,640 with premium).

Helen Day is a language teacher, collector of Ladybird books and expert on the history of the books and the company behind them.

A recent Freeman’s Hindman (28/27% buyer’s premium) sale in Chicago included a first edition of John Locke’s foundational text on civil society and the nature of government 'Two Treatises of Government….'

Inscriptions and annotations can make a massive difference to value