James Joyce's wartime family passport, recording the writer's movements across Europe as he penned his masterpiece Ulysses, has sold for £61,250 (€69,747) at auction in London today.
Other artefacts to go under the hammer today included the original handwritten football rulebook and the earliest surviving Jane Austen manuscript.
The passport almost exactly maps, arguably, the writer's most creative period, covering the writing and publication of the book for which he is best known.
A striking feature of the artefact is that Nora Barnacle is included on the passport as Joyce's wife. In fact, the couple had eloped from Ireland in 1904, and would not get married until 1931.
The passport was sold by a private collector at a Sotheby's auction of rare books and other memorabilia in London earlier today. It had a guide price of between £50,000 and £70,000.
Other Joycean artefacts to go under the hammer today included an autographed letter from Joyce to fellow writer Ford Maddox Ford which sold for £12,500 and one to John McCormack which reached £8,125. A second impresion copy of Ulysses, signed by the author in Paris, sold for £3,750.
Separately, a first edition of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels sold for £49,250.
The earliest surviving Jane Austen manuscript, a handwritten draft for a book that was never published, sold for £993,250 at today's auction.
The manuscript for The Watsons was bought by an anonymous telephone bidder for more than three times the top estimate. The manuscript was Austen's only literary work during the period between finishing Northanger Abbey in 1799 and beginning Mansfield Park in 1811.
The earliest codified rules of soccer, part of the archive of the oldest football club in the world, Sheffield FC, fetched £881,250 at today's auction.
The Sheffield rules are credited with introducing free kicks for fouls, corners and throw-ins. The code was also first to eliminate the “fair catch” rule which permitted players to catch the ball from the air and claim a free kick, similar to the “mark” rule in modern rugby. Its removal paved the way for a culture of heading the ball.
A notable absence from the code was any form of off-side rule.
The lot, which also contains several club minute books and match reports from the time, is being put up for auction by non-league Sheffield FC to help fund the construction of the new stadium.
Club chairman Richard Sims described the decision to sell “this remarkable piece of sporting history” as tough but said the proceeds would allow the club survive for another 150 years.