Alan Turing's personal copy of his PhD dissertation and an original offprint of "On Computable Numbers" together with a  loose-leaf copy of his portrait photograph that bears his signature are the most highly valued lots in an auction to be held on June 17, 2025 by Hansons in Lichfield, Staffordshire and online to wordwide bid bidders.

The collection, referred to as "The Alan Turing Papers", had been in the possession of Norman Routledge, a personal friend of Alan Turing, and had been given to him by Turing's mother, Sara, shortly after her son's tragic death in 1954.

After Norman Routledge died in 2013 his personal papers were retrieved from his loft and stashed away in her own loft by one of his sisters, where they remained until her house was being cleared by her daughters around a decade later. They were inclined to shred all the documents, but decided to consult other family members first and the collection was taken in a carrier bag to a family reunion in November 2024 and subsequently to a valuation at Hanson's. 

Describing the collection as:

"the most important archive I've ever handled" 

Rare Book Auctions director, Jim Spencer, commented:

"Nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to find in that carrier bag."

Adding:

"These seemingly plain papers – perfectly preserved in the muted colors of their unadorned, academic wrappers – represent the foundations of computer science and modern digital computing."

Commenting on the task of  valuing the items and compiling the catalog, Spencer said:

“Anything with a direct connection to Turing is highly desirable and almost impossible to find. These papers were owned by his close friend Norman, having been gifted to him by Turing’s mother. That’s what makes this collection so significant."

Another significant collection of Turing papers, offprints of his publications that had been given personally by Alan Turing to his friend and mentor Max Newman, came up for auction in 2010 by Christie's, London and was described, as we reported at the time as:

an unparalleled collection of the writings of the founder of modern computing science, and one that is unlikely to be replicated

The lot comprised 15 offprints, including an offprint of Newman's obituary of Turing in Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society and a page from the Visitors' book of the Newman household with four signatures by Alan Turing during 1947 to 1948. This collection had an estimated value of £300,000 to £500,000 but was unsold with the highest bid of £240,000 failing to meet the reserve. It was subsequently bought on behalf of the Bletchley Park Trust after a fundraising appeal initiated by Gareth Halfacree to which Google was a major donor. 

So now 15 years later there's a comparable collection of offprints plus and the task of valuing it fell to Jim Spencer who, in his account of the task, writes: 

“Literature has always been my forte, not mathematics, so the past few months of intensively researching and cataloguing these papers has left me feeling that Alan Turing was superhuman. For me, it’s like studying the language of another planet, something composed by an ultra-intelligent civilisation."

For me the most interesting lot in the upcoming sale is the handwritten letter dated 16 May 1956 to "Dear Mr Routledge" and signed E Sara Turing. The letter starts by informing him that she has sent him by registered post:

13 of Alan's offprints and the RS notice of him 

and she apologizes for not sending the papers on morphogenesis as she had already sent the only copy she had "to Kings Library."

But she continues by raising doubt about the verdict of suicide, proposing instead that Alan had poisoned himself by accident:

I don’t know what people in Cambridge thought of the manner of Alan’s death. I am convinced it was accidental as the experiment of coke under electrolysis – which smelt of cyanide had been going on for weeks – I feel sure he got some of this on his fingers & so on to the apple he customarily ate in bed. Everything was found at his house quite normal and acceptances of invitations were there ready for post, new socks he just bought. His haphazard ways often made me very anxious.

This letter has a valuation of £1,000 - 2,000 and a bid of £500 has already been made.

Lot 2 has the same valuation and the same open bid has already been received. It comprises an original telegram sent by Turing to Routledge in March 1951 congratulating him on his Fellowship plus scanned copies and transcripts of two letters sent to Routledge by Turing in February 1952, after his arrest for indecent behavior, one of which includes his famous syllogism, "Turing believes that machines think / Turing lies with men / Therefore machines do not think", and closes"Yours in distress, Alan." The transcripts are annotated by Routledge with instructions to himself on how they ought to be read aloud during his part in Hugh Whitemore's 1996 play "Breaking the Code". 

Next under the hammer come two offprints of the Royal Society obituary written by Newman, described as:

Very well-preserved, one offprint in near-fine/fine condition, the other with some light splash-marks to final leaves but otherwise near-fine/fine (2) 

and with an estimated value of £500-1,000 and a current bid of £300.

An opening bid has yet to be made for the offprint of the PhD thesis titled "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals". As this bears Turing's signature on its cover page it is likely to be of interest, but the estimate of £40,000 - 60,000 does seem high, as does the same value placed on an offprint of "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", which isn't signed by Turing but comes with a photograph that he had signed.

One of the highest bids made so far is for a tattered and torn single-sheet pre-print of Turing's very first published paper with the title Equivalence of Left and Right Almost Periodicity, plus an offprint its published version extracted from the Journal of the London Mathematical Society, Vol. 10, 1935.

Despite it not having been included in the papers sent to him by Sara Turing, Routledge's collection did include a copy, bearing his signature, of The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, which is valued at £10,000 - 15,000.

The final two lots in the auction are not Turing papers . There is a highly personal collection of letters and photographs from the novelist E M Forster who, like Turing, was a personal friend of Routledge and there is a complete typed draft, in 278 pages, of an autobiography of Normal Routledge himself, which is also on a USB stick. This is accompanied by the transcript of Routledge's recorded interviews for "Web of Stories", in which he discusses Alan Turing, and six DVDs of the recordings themselves.   

More Information

The Turing Papers catalog on the-saleroom.com

The Turing Digital Archive

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