The Wipers Times First World War Newspaper Sold for £7,000

A near complete run of The Wipers Times trench newspaper written and printed by soldiers during the First World War has sold for £7,000 in the Books, Maps and Manuscripts sale at Tennants Auctioneers.

In early 1916, the 12th Sherwood Foresters found an abandoned printing press in the town of Ypres in Belgium. A sergeant who had been a printer in peacetime brought the press to life and established The Wipers Times. The name ‘Wipers’ came from the Tommy slang pronunciation of Ypres. 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, 23 issues were printed and the collection at auction offered 22 of them. 

Other highlights included:

• a copy of the King James Bible printed by Robert Barker in 1612, the first quarto edition of the King James’ version, sold for £2,200
• a scarce copy of A Treatise on the Law of Corporations by Stewart Kyd - who was friends with the radical politicians Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke and who was held at the Tower of London in 1794 for a while on a charge of treason - printed in 1793-94 (£1,600) 
• a first edition, first impression (London, Secker and Warburg,, 1949) of George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four (£4,000)
• a set of the three 1955 editions of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (£4,000), and a 1955 copy of The Hobbit or There and Back Again, sold with a selection of related works, (£2,500)