Scientific papers by the father of computing, Alan Turing, which narrowly avoided the shredder, are expected to fetch over £100,000 at auction.
The collection was gifted to Turing’s friend, Norman Routledge, by his mother, before being stored in Routledge’s niece’s loft following his death in 2013.
The papers, known as offprints, were produced in very small numbers and distributed within academia, making them incredibly scarce survivors that rarely ever appear on the market.
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Historically, the exchange of offprints has been a method of correspondence between scholars.
They are prized by collectors as representing the first separate edition of an important work.
The collection includes Turing’s PhD dissertation from 1938-39, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals.
It is signed by Turing, having been his personal copy.
This paper alone has been valued at £40,000 to £60,000.
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Also featured is On Computable Numbers, 1936-37, which introduced the world to a universal computing machine capable of implementing any computer algorithm.
It has been described as the first programming manual of the computer age.
It also has a guide price of £40,000 to £60,000, as reported by What’s The Jam.
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Alan Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science.
He was one of the famous Codebreakers at Bletchley Park who played a vital role in cracking the Enigma code which was crucial to the Allied victory in World War Two.
In 1952, Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts and given hormone treatment – a procedure commonly referred to as “chemical castration” – as an alternative to prison.
He died in 1954, aged 41, from cyanide poisoning.
An inquest determined his death as suicide but the evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning.
Norman Routledge kept the collection of Turing’s offprints, as well as letters from novelist E. M. Forster, which were eventually rescued by his nieces and nephews.
One of the nieces explained the discovery.
She said: “Following his retirement from Eton College, Norman bought and lived in a house in Bermondsey.
“When he died in 2013, two of his sisters had the unenviable task of sorting through and emptying the contents.
“There were lots of personal papers which one sister carted away and stored in her loft.
“The papers lay dormant until she moved into a care home almost a decade later.
“Her daughters came across the papers and considered shredding everything.
“Fortunately, they checked with Norman’s nieces and nephews because he’d always been a presence in our lives.
“Norman was an amazing man who showed genuine interest in everyone he came into contact with.
“His family was very important to him.
“He kept in regular contact and was interested in what each one was doing.
“We finally had an opportunity to see Norman’s papers in November 2024.
“The papers were brought along in a carrier bag.
“One cousin felt the Turing and Forster papers might be of interest to collectors. “
After taking them home for a closer look she decided to have them valued.
Jim Spencer, director of Rare Book Auctions, described the collection as the most important archive he’d ever handled.
“Nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to find in that carrier bag,” he said.
“These seemingly plain papers – perfectly preserved in the muted colours of their
unadorned, academic wrappers – represent the foundations of computer science and
modern digital computing.
“The past few months of intensively researching and cataloguing these papers have 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 civilization.
“At the same time, I keep thinking of the tragic end to Turing’s life, precisely because he was treated as an alien – charged as a criminal, barred from GCHQ, banned from the United States and forced to undergo chemical castration.
“And for nothing more than his sexuality.”
The collection also includes The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis. from 1952.
It is Turing’s lesser-known theory of mathematical biology and his last major published work.
It has since become a basic model in theoretical biology, describing what has come to be known as Turing patterns.
Jim Spencer added: “Hardly anything like this appears on the open market.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire this material.”
The auction will be held on 17th June by Rare Book Auctions, Lichfield, Staffs.
