Market Information - Hobbit First Edition 4th Printing with jacket - 4x prior seller's price

The listing has been updated with pictures including the bookplate., and he has dropped the price.

That's a nice, neat & tidy bookplate anyway. No need to have been hiding it.

That's good - only a little under 3 times the prior seller's [final] asking price now. Just reporting the facts with regards this specific copy and its sales history, so potential buyers can make informed purchase decisions based on real market values. Sales history tends to get lost in eBay, so people can easily become misinformed as to how the market has previously responded to offerings when they come back up for sale.

No one is claiming this is not a nice copy. It is just a nice copy that was up for sale for a long time at £2000 (then £1900) and it seems, finally raised a little to £2,500.

Edit. I have attached prior sales info from eBay. It appears to have finally sold at the point the asking price was £2,500 (so the seller got a little more than he had been asking for on the previous listings, which I kept a close eye on [In the end I personally got a jacketed copy for £510 - though not nearly such a nice jacket as this one]).

Here’s the eBay listing info from the prior sale for posterity.

This site uses affiliate links for which we may be compensated

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien 1946 Hardback Book Fourth Impression (ID:05156)

174331243002

Seller: godslobotomy

(823)

Ended Jun 28, 2020

This item ended more than 90 days ago

Also worth noting that some attempt has been made to reduce the impact of the prior catalogue number (removing sicker and partial erasing of the square bracket ink marks). I'm not a huge fan of this kind of pen mark tidy up as it tends to thin the paper. Also seems a bit pointless as the 485 wasn't going anywhere.

I think I'd personally have had a crack at removing the sticker too, tbh. Wasn't particularly neat looking. A clean pen number looks a lot better. Having said that, not sure if I'd actually have gone through with it on £2500 book. And if the number was known to mean something (the owner was known, etc) then I wouldn't have touched it, obviously.

It really is a cracking jacket though.

@Khamûl wrote:
I think I'd personally have had a crack at removing the sticker too, tbh. Wasn't particularly neat looking. A clean pen number looks a lot better. Having said that, not sure if I'd actually have gone through with it on £2500 book. And if the number was known to mean something (the owner was known, etc) then I wouldn't have touched it, obviously.

It really is a cracking jacket though.

Oh yeah, I'd have removed the sticker as well. I meant I wouldn't have tried to rub out the pen marks as the only way to do it is to use light abrasive and the wartime paper is very, very thin and then it is prone to looking translucent from the reverse if you hold up to the light.