Man Stumbles on a Collection of Original Winnie-The-Pooh Drawings in an Unexpected Place

Winnie-the-Pooh has always been one of the favorite fictional characters for children. Recently, a man discovered a treasure trove of the iconic bear's original sketches and drafts in an unusual place, stated BBC. The stash once belonged to A.A. Milne, the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, and it ended up getting sold at an auction for a whopping $118,000. The sketches and drafts were discovered in the attic of a former publisher, Leslie Smith, after his demise. Smith's son, Simon, was clearing out his father's attic at his Melvern, England home when he found those unseen materials.

The materials were stuffed inside various plastic bags and there was a letter of correspondence between Milne and his illustrator and publisher, too. "We were just clearing out the attic and found a plastic carrier bag full of letters," Simon explained to BBC. "We started going through them and found many signatures we couldn’t even decipher and then we found the A.A. Milne. We were a bit gobsmacked, to say the least." Winnie-the-Pooh made his first appearance on December 24, 1995, in Milne's story, The Wrong Sort of Bees. It was published in the London Evening News.

Winnie-the-Pooh rapidly gained popularity among children, and the character spawned a multi-million dollar media franchise later purchased by Disney. The collection of A.A. Milne's materials discovered in Smith's attic was from the early days when the fictional bear was first created. There were original, manuscripts, poems, and letters that were exchanged between Milne and E.H. Shepard, who was his illustrator. "The collection includes design ideas for individual Christmas cards from characters including Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and Eeyore," Fieldings Auctioneers, an auction house that sold the materials, wrote on their website.

The stash also contained mock-ups of Now We Are Six and The House at Pooh Corner and the original mock-ups for Christopher Robin's Birthday Book. There was also a pen and ink drawing of Pooh and Piglet walking side by side in the snow. The fascinating collection of Smith extended beyond his ties with Milne and shed some light on the career he had in the publishing industry.

Smith, who passed away in 2023, was the founder of Cressrelles Publishing Company in 1971. He later took over the business of Frederick Muller, who was the publisher of Winnie-the-Pooh. "I knew we had some letters from authors," Simon told BBC. "But I assumed it was our authors and playwrights that we handled. I thought he’d kept those in case they were worth anything in the future."

Smith also had connections with some of the most prominent writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings series. "There’s four of us and plenty of grandchildren and lots of great-grandchildren, so where would they go in the family?” Smith told the BBC, hoping the literary materials would be appreciated by others. "We would like to see them somewhere useful." Simon's findings were sectioned into 34 lots and were sold off to British and American buyers at the auction. "These are incredibly unique," auctioneer Will Farmer told the news outlet. "Within everything that everybody all around the world knows about Milne, these are to my mind probably one of the last little pieces of the puzzle that will complete the whole story."