The first complete version of the Bible in Chinese has sold at auction for over £56,000 after being given to an Oxfam store in Essex.
The Chinese edition Bible was translated by John Lassar and Joshua Marsham and published as a series between 1815 and 1822, and starting with the Pentateuch.
It was present in a pile of donations by volunteers at Oxfam’s Chelmsford branch, who suspected it could be more precious than their usual material.
The Bible was put up for auction by Bonhams and was expected to sell for around £600-£800. In fact, after two weeks of bidding, it was bought for a staggering £56,280.
Nick Reeves, Oxfam Chelmsford’s bookshop manager, said of the auction, “We never imagined it’d go for this much. We were sat watching the bidding and just seeing it go up and up. When it finally ended, I used to be in complete shock. We were absolutely speechless.
“It’s amazing to think that a donation from our shop could help raise that much money for Oxfam. It’s just wonderful.”
Various Oxfam stores across the country also got here into the possession of quite a lot of rare books and put them up for auction with Bonhams. In total the auction of 23 books raised a complete of £105,000, of which greater than half got here from the proceeds of the Chinese Bible.
Charles Dickens proved to be the subsequent most wanted writer. A primary edition of “A Christmas Carol” sold for £16,640, while a Dickens’ autograph with a quotation from the novel also went for £12,160.
The first English translation of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto raised £7,040, while a primary edition of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” sold for £2,560.
A primary edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Return of the King” sold for £2,048.
According to Sotheby’s the most costly text ever bought at auction was the Codex Leicester, a manuscript created by Leonardo da Vinci. It was bought by Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million, which, adjusted for inflation, can be around $63.3 million today.
