Joyce passport sells for £61,250

EOIN BURKE-KENNEDY

JAMES JOYCE’S wartime family passport, recording the writer’s movements across Europe as he penned his masterpiece Ulysses , sold for £61,250 (€69,747) at auction in London yesterday.

The passport was sold by a private collector at a Sotheby’s auction of rare books and other memorabilia. It had a guide price of between £50,000 and £70,000.

The earliest surviving Jane Austen manuscript, a handwritten draft for a book that was not published in her lifetime, sold for £993,250 at the auction.

The manuscript for The Watsons was bought by an anonymous telephone bidder for more than three times its guide price.

The uncompleted novel, containing only five chapters or 18,000 words, was Austen’s only literary work during the period between finishing Northanger Abbey in 1799 and beginning Mansfield Park in 1811.

The earliest known soccer rulebook dating from 1858 sold for £881,250 at the same auction.

The handwritten pamphlet was part of an archive of football memorabilia put up for sale by Sheffield FC, acknowledged by Fifa as the world’s oldest football club.

The lot, which also contains several club minute books and match reports from the time, was put up for auction by the English non-league side to help fund the construction of a new stadium.

The Sheffield rules, credited with introducing free kicks, corners and throw-ins, formed the basis for the English Football Association’s Laws of the Game in 1863 – the blueprint for the modern game.

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