Rupert Annuals: How to Identify the Early Daily Express Annuals and What They Are Worth

Rupert annuals have been published by the Daily Express every year since 1936, and nearly all are worth very little. The exceptions fall into three groups: the pre-war hardbacks of 1936 to 1941, led by the first annual, The New Adventures of Rupert, which has made £700 to £2,500 at auction depending on condition and jacket; the soft-covered annuals of 1942 to 1949, printed on economy paper and hard to find clean; and one freak, the 1973 annual in the few copies with Alfred Bestall's brown-faced Rupert on the cover, two of which sold at Duke's of Dorchester in October 2007 for £23,000 and £22,000. This guide shows how to tell the eras apart, how to separate originals from the facsimiles published from 1985, and which faults move the price most.

The eras at a glance

Years	Format	Artist	What to look for	Price bracket where sourced
1936 to 1941	Hardback, red cloth spine, pictorial jacket; undated	Alfred Bestall	A different title each year; jacket; no ISBN or edition number	1936: £700 to £2,500 at auction
1942 to 1949	Soft card covers, economy paper; undated	Bestall	Spine ends intact; paper not browned	Pre-1950: "up to £100 plus per issue" (Hansons, 2015)
1950 to 1957	Pictorial boards; undated	Bestall	Artwork endpapers; price corner unclipped	Runs of several years: £60 to £240
1958 to 1972	Pictorial boards; dated	Bestall (covers; strips to 1965)	Magic Painting pages 1960 to 1968 unused; 1970 and 1971 scarcer	A few pounds unless untouched
1973	Pictorial boards, Purnell, 53p	Bestall's last cover	Brown or white face on the cover	Brown: £22,000 and £23,000 (Duke's, 2007); white: a few pounds

Titles were reused until 1957 (More Adventures of Rupert is the 1937, 1942 and 1947 annual, The New Rupert Book the 1938, 1946 and 1951), so a title does not date a copy, and nor does a date: the Comic Book Price Guide for Great Britain notes that the annuals were not dated before 1958, and the Followers of Rupert Bear record the 1958 title page as the first to show its year. Dealers date earlier copies from the stories, which the society lists year by year.

The 1936 annual: why it is the prize

Mary Tourtel created Rupert for the Daily Express in 1920, but the annuals belong to Alfred Bestall, who took over the strip in 1935 and drew the first annual the next year. The New Adventures of Rupert was printed by Greycaines and sold for half a crown. Jonkers Rare Books and the Followers of Rupert Bear describe the same book: plain red boards with lettering and a small vignette of Rupert, strips inside in red and black, and a coloured wraparound jacket of Rupert swinging from a kite. It also has uncoloured pictures for the reader's paintbox, five by World Collectors Net's count, and the copies handled by Jonkers and Rooke Books both showed a child's pencil colouring on them.

It is the prize because it opens a run collectors try to complete, and because the jacket, which World Collectors Net calls very scarce, carries most of the value. World Collectors Net gives Bloomsbury Auctions' range for the book as £200 to £2,000 depending on condition; the named results are £2,500 at Bamfords of Derby in April 2003, reported by the Antiques Trade Gazette, and £700 at Bloomsbury in November 2008 for a copy with a frayed, damp-stained jacket. Bookride noted in 2007 that the guidebooks put a jacketed copy at £2,000 to £3,000. The 1937 to 1939 annuals are the same format at 2/6, and 1940 and 1941 continued in hardback with a red cloth spine at 3/- and 3/6; none has the pull of the first.

The wartime annuals, 1942 to 1949

Wikipedia, the Followers of Rupert Bear and Hansons' 2015 sale notes all say the same: the annual never missed a year, but the war changed its form. The 1942 annual was the first with soft card covers rather than the hard covers of the previous six, and a PBFA dealer describes the 1943 annual, published in the autumn of 1942, as in card covers under the war economy regulations. The society's pages for 1945 and 1949 record soft card covers too, and Tennants catalogued a 1945 to 1949 run as original pictorial paper covers against pictorial boards from 1950, so the soft format ran for eight years.

The paper is the problem. Economy stock browns and turns brittle, the spine strip tears at the foot and the back cover comes away, and Hansons' specialist noted that the paperbacks were more prone to wear and so are rarer in good condition than the pre-war hardbacks. The 1943 copies offered by Rooke Books and The Old Children's Bookshelf both had failed hinges or missing spine ends, and the latter was priced at £120 even so. Read the spine ends and hinges before the covers.

The Bestall era, 1950 to 1972

Boards came back in 1950, and until 1957 the annuals are undated pictorial hardbacks with Bestall's painted covers and artwork endpapers. Bestall drew the newspaper strip until 1965 and the annual covers until 1973, so the whole run is his. From 1958 the annuals are dated, and from 1960 to 1968 they include the Magic Painting pages, printed pictures that reveal colour under a wet brush.

Prices are modest. Bookride's 2007 view was that 1960s and 1970s annuals generally go for a fiver, the Comic Book Price Guide values the run in single figures or low tens of pounds in the middle grades, with 1970 and 1971 the two it calls traditionally difficult to find, and David Lay sold a nine-volume 1950s run in October 2022 for £60. What lifts a 1960s annual above that is an unclipped price, an empty ownership panel and, above all, untouched Magic Painting pages.

The 1973 annual: brown face or white face

Here is what the sources agree on. Bestall painted the 1973 cover with Rupert's face brown, as he had always drawn him, while the strips inside, following the newspaper's practice, showed a white-faced bear. A small number of annuals were printed that way before the Daily Express altered the cover to a white face without consulting Bestall. He was angry and never drew another annual cover; the Followers of Rupert Bear simply note that 1973 was his last. The brown-faced copies are the rarest Rupert item there is.

The sources disagree on why and on how many. Dominic Winter's catalogue, quoted by National News in 2010, says the editor complained that the brown bear blended into the background; Duke's catalogue, quoted by Bookride in 2007, says the change answered young readers puzzled that Rupert was brown outside and white inside. World Collectors Net gives both as theories. On numbers, Duke's said only twelve other copies were believed to exist, World Collectors Net and National News say about a dozen were printed, Bookride put it at about fifteen, and the Comic Book Price Guide says a handful. Duke's also stated that the white-faced run kept Bestall's signature in an altered colour; we have found no second source for that, nor for World Collectors Net's figure of half a million white-faced copies.

The one firm set of prices is the October 2007 sale at Duke's of Dorchester, where two brown-faced copies from the collection of Freddie Chaplain, a later writer of the strip, made £23,000 and £22,000 against estimates of £5,000 to £8,000. Bookride quotes the Sunday Express report, and World Collectors Net and National News repeat the figures. The Sunday Express also gave the previous record as £16,000, which we have not confirmed. A further copy was offered at Dominic Winter in June 2010 with an estimate of up to £30,000; we have not found the result. Two lower figures, a £4,800 sale recorded by the Comic Book Price Guide and a dealer's report of a copy unsold at a bid above £10,000, are single-source. Rupert stayed brown on the covers for decades, so a brown face on any other year is normal, and a white-faced 1973 annual is worth a few pounds.

Facsimiles versus originals

Express Newspapers published a facsimile of the 1936 annual in 1985 for its fiftieth anniversary, and the Followers of Rupert Bear record that this began a series: 1937 in 1986, 1939 in 1991, 1940 in 1992, 1941 in 1993 and 1942 in 1994, continuing with gaps to the 1970 annual, the last reproduced. Some years were never done (1946, 1960 and 1973 among them), and the 1942 reprint is not a true facsimile, because words thought inappropriate were removed, leaving gaps in the rhymes.

The facsimiles copy the boards and jackets closely, so check for what the originals never had. The 1985 facsimile of the 1936 annual is a numbered limited edition (dealers cite copies 7251 and 12192) with ISBN 0850791499 and an Express Newspapers imprint dated 1985, and some came with a promotional band, which Tennants noted on a 1936 to 1938 set in 2017. An original Daily Express annual has no ISBN, no limitation number and no imprint later than its own year. Dealers ask £60 to £150 for the 1936 facsimile, but Halls sold a 1936 to 1945 set with later annuals for £140 in August 2019. Our guide to facsimile dust jackets covers the general tells.

Condition, the price corner and the Magic Painting pages

Three things specific to annuals sit alongside the usual condition grades.

The price corner. The price was printed in a corner of the front cover with a dotted line to cut along, so the annual could be given without the price showing. Dealers call a copy price clipped when the corner has been cut, and unclipped or price intact when it has not; St Mary's Books notes a 1948 annual as price clipped with a marked front cover and prices it at £60. On a post-war annual the unclipped corner is the whole premium.

The ownership panel. Every annual has a This Book Belongs To panel. Empty is better, but on an early copy a neat inscription is accepted; Jonkers' near fine 1936 had one.

The Magic Painting pages, 1960 to 1968. Untouched pages are what dealers mean by a fine copy of those years; once painted, the Comic Book Price Guide reckons the value is practically halved, and lower again if the pages dried wavy. Ask whether any have been done, even partly.

Traps

A facsimile sold as an original. The 1985 to 1990s reprints are old enough to look worn. Look for the number, the ISBN and the imprint.

A brown face on the wrong annual. Only 1973 matters; 1974 and 1977 annuals with brown-faced covers are standard, as Bookride's correspondents keep discovering.

Complete runs. A run sold as complete from 1936 often has facsimiles for the early years, as Tennants' 2017 run did. A complete run of 1936 to 2019 and 2021 made £750 at Dominic Winter on 19 June 2025, a figure that only makes sense if the early volumes were not jacketed originals.

What they have sold for

Reported results with their sources, not valuations; condition and jacket move them by a factor of ten.

Annual	Sale	Price
1936	Bamfords, Derby, April 2003 (Antiques Trade Gazette)	£2,500
1936, frayed, damp-stained jacket	Bloomsbury Auctions, November 2008 (World Collectors Net)	£700
1936, poor, in a lot of about 104 Rupert books	Martel Maides, 2 December 2022	£95 the lot
1973, brown face, two copies	Duke's, Dorchester, October 2007 (Sunday Express via Bookride)	£23,000 and £22,000
1945 to 1952 with a Tourtel story book, nine volumes	Bonhams, Oxford, 26 March 2014	£237.50 with premium
1950s run of nine	David Lay, 7 October 2022	£60
Complete run 1936 to 2019 and 2021	Dominic Winter, 19 June 2025	£750
1936 to 1945 facsimiles with later annuals	Halls, 21 August 2019	£140

Bookride also reported £1,000 at Bonhams in 2004 and £1,500 at Bloomsbury in 2005 for the 1936 annual; we have not traced those to the houses. If you have an early annual, grade it honestly, decide whether it is an original, and compare it with sold copies in the same state rather than asking prices: our guide to what a book is worth explains how, and for a jacketed 1936 or a brown-faced 1973 our guide to where to sell rare books in the UK names the houses to approach. Rupert sits with the other children's classics we track.