Samuel Beckett Novel Auctioned For £12,000

The first edition of Samuel Beckett’s 1938 novel named Murphy has recently been sold at an auction for £12,000.

The book was sold at the charity’s annual Bonhams book auction and was sold at a price which turned out to be double the expected price.

The novel Murphy was published in 1938 and was the first novel of Nobel Prize winning author. The auctioned book happens to be one of the 1500 books originally published and only one of few that have survived in their original dust jacket.

The book was previously denoted to Oxfam Books and Music in Berkhamstead where the store’s book specialist Geoff Smith spotted it.

After the auction, Smith said that he has been absolutely delighted about the sum that the book has generated for Oxfam.

He further said that he already know that book is valuable, but some search on the internet told him that it was far more valuable than he thought.

He also said that “It’s wonderful that we were able to maximise the money made from this extremely generous donation and so raising as much money as possible for Oxfam’s projects fighting poverty around the world.”

The novel was among the several rare books that were donated to Oxfam and during the last year and that were auctioned at Bonhams on 26^th of June.

The entire auctioned books raised a sum of £21,000 which is sufficient to pay for the six water tanks providing thousands of liters of clean water to many families in Africa.

Other items that were auctioned during the same event include Helmut Newton’s limited edition Sumo which was auctioned for £1,000, A Balloon View of London which was a large lithograph map of London in 1851, sold for £900, and a collection of four limited-edition songbooks by AA Milne and signed by all the contributors, sold for £2,500.