Rugby School 'rare' books auction raises £775k

William Shakespeare's Fourth Folio sold for £38,000

An auction of 300 books from Rugby School's library has fetched £775,000.

Among the lots was William Shakespeare's Fourth Folio, from 1685, which was sold for £38,000.

The sale included a first edition of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol which sold for £8,500 while a first edition Robinson Crusoe made £8,000.

The highest bid went to another Shakespeare lot, a Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies second edition, from 1632, which made £48,000.

It had an estimate of £20,000-£30,000.

The school, founded in 1567, said the proceeds from the sale would be used to benefit students and extend its current bursary schemes.

The first edition of A Christmas Carol fetched £8,500

Rupert Powell, deputy chairman at Forum Auctions, which hosted the sale, said the auction had fetched "more than double" the lowest estimates, with hundreds of participants.

He said it was a "white glove" sale, meaning all lots were sold.

"To have four different folio editions of Shakespeare in the same sale is unusual, there was lots of interest before and during, on the phone and online."

Many of the books came from the library of a former pupil at Rugby School

The books on offer on Wednesday covered "an impressively wide range of interests", the school said, including horsemanship, duelling, mountaineering, sermons, military history, psalms and maps.

The school said the books deserved to be "preserved, stored - and enjoyed - in specialist conditions".

Many of the books came from the library of Matthew Holbeche Bloxam, who was a pupil in the 19th Century, the school said.

In 2018, Mail Online reported the private school had raised nearly £15m by selling a large selection of artwork, with one item fetching more than £11m.