AN auction has seen scientific papers by Alan Turing sell for more than £465,000.
The sale by Lichfield-based Rare Book Auctions came after they had been almost shredded after being discovered in a plastic carrier bag.
The collection, which had been stashed away in a loft for decades, was sold by the family of Norman Routledge – a mathematician and long-time friend of the famed World War Two code-breaker.
They had been gifted to him by Turing’s mother, Ethel, and included rare academic prints.
Items sold included Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals, which went for £110,500, while a copy of On Computable Numbers went for £208,000, smashing the auction estimate of £40,000 to £60,000.
Jim Spencer, director of Rare Book Auctions, said:
“Nothing could’ve prepared me for what I found in that carrier bag. These plain, academic papers were absolutely electrifying – they are the very bedrock of modern computing.”
Other items in the sale included Turing’s final major work, The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, which fetched £19,500 and a copy of The Word Problem in Semi-Groups with Cancellation which sold for £28,600.
Jim added:
“This was the most important archive I’ve ever handled. The papers came within inches of being destroyed, but instead they’ve captured the world’s imagination.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime discovery – not just for collectors, but for the sake of preserving the story of one of the greatest minds in history.”
