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yesterday

Alan Turing’s Rediscovered Papers Fetch Record £465,400 at Staffordshire Auction

Rescued from near destruction in a Bermondsey loft, the rare offprints include Turing’s foundational computing works alongside personal letters that drew fierce bidding.

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Overview

  • Hansons Auctioneers sold the archive on June 17, 2025, in Lichfield for £465,400—vastly exceeding the £40,000–£60,000 estimate per lot.
  • ‘On Computable Numbers’ commanded £208,000 and ‘Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals’ sold for £110,500, while ‘The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis’ brought £19,500.
  • The archive comprises 13 limited-run offprints, including Turing’s signed dissertation, wartime notebooks and letters from novelist E.M. Forster.
  • Originally gifted by Turing’s mother to mathematician Norman Routledge, the papers lay forgotten in a loft after Routledge’s death in 2013 and were nearly shredded.
  • Turing’s works within the trove underpin modern computing theory and reflect his crucial role in cracking the German Enigma code during World War II.