The Wipers Times Sell For £7,000

A near complete run of ‘The Wipers Times’, the newspaper written and printed by soldiers during the First World War, sold for £7,000 in the Books, Maps and Manuscripts Sale at Tennants Auctioneers on 21^st August (all figures exclude buyer’s premium). In early 1916, the 12^th Sherwood Foresters found an abandoned printing press in the town of Ypres. A sergeant who had been a printer in peacetime, brought the press to life and The Wipers Times was born. Edited by Captain Roberts, the paper provided a satirical view of life in the trenches, and the title of the publication changed each time the battalion moved location. In total, twenty-three issues were printed, and the present collection offers twenty-two of them. The name ‘Wipers’ came from the Tommy slang pronunciation of Ypres, and its story was turned into a television programme in 2013 by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman.

In a generally very buoyant sale all round, further highlights included a copy of the King James Bible, which was printed by Robert Barker in 1612 and was the first quarto edition of the King James’ version, sold for £2,200. Far exceeding pre-sale expectations was a scarce copy of A Treatise on the Law of Corporations by Stewart Kyd, printed in 1793-94, which sold for £1,600. Kyd (1758-1811) was friends with the radical politicians Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke, and was admitted to the Tower in 1794.

Amongst the fiction in the sale, a copy of George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four sold for £4,000. Published in London in 1949 by Secker and Warburg, it is the first edition, first impression of the dystopian novel. The demand for J. R. R. Tolkien continues in the saleroom, and a set of the three 1955 editions of his Lord of the Rings sold for £4,000, and a 1955 copy of The Hobbit or There and Back Again, which was sold with a selection of related works, sold for £2,500.

The sale achieved a total hammer price of £86,690 for 188 lots and a 94% sold rate.

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