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An historic collection of religious books whose sale for £36,000 was approved last year by a Church of England diocese has been sold on by a book dealer for more than £500,000.

The Diocese of Truro sanctioned a deal in September 2006 to sell hundreds of old Bibles and manuscripts from its library to John Thornton in a move to clear shelf space.

The decision to sell at such a low price has astounded antiquarian booksellers, who have described it as “one of the killings of the century”.

Auction sales alone after Mr Thornton gained access to the collection have generated about half a million pounds. Mr Thornton has now closed his shop in Chelsea, West London, and has told The Times that he is planning to retire to the country.

Church officials have been left baffled by the decision to sell the collection. They are seeking legal advice to discover why the trust that owns the books did not profit more from the sale. Jeremy Dowling, spokesman for the Truro diocese and its board of finance, said that the deal was a “terrible shame” but had been done to make room.

“Those on the management committee had no idea of the value of the material they were dealing with. The decision was made in principle that the pre1800 collection be disposed of simply because in the past ten years no one had inquired about any book in it at all. Therefore, the library management committee felt that the space was being taken up in a way that was not productive.

“What Mr Thornton bought, he bought in good faith. The difficulty arises as to whether or not the trustees were sufficiently aware of what was going on,” he said.

The collection came from the Bishop Phillpotts Library, founded by Henry Phillpotts, a 19th-century Bishop of Exeter, who left 2,000 books to serve the clergy of Cornwall.

In 2004 the Truro diocesan board of finance approved plans by the trustees of the library to sell all the pre1800 volumes to a dealer. They failed to call in a recognised auction house to make a valuation. Instead, they invited a number of dealers to make offers.

There remains some dispute over how many dealers wanted the collection, but the Church concedes that Mr Thornton’s offer was the highest that they received. Two years later the library accepted it and the books were taken away in three white vans.

Experts first became aware of the deal last December as rare Bibles from the collection began to emerge on the market. Dominic Winter, of Dominic Winter Book Auctions in South Cerney, near Cirencester, sold an illustrated 400lb 63-volume Macklin Bible for £47,000 on Mr Thornton’s behalf – £11,000 more than Mr Thornton had paid for the entire collection.

He told The Times yesterday that the library should have evaluated the books properly or gone to auction.

“The fault, if there is a fault, lies with the people looking after the library because they did not cast around. We do not think that they went to any auctioneers in the first place or get any more quotes for the job,” he said.

About 50 lots with provenance from the Phillpotts library were offered in a Sotheby’s book sale in June. The story of the extraordinary sale first emerged in the magazine Bookdealer.

Alan Shelley, president of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association, said that somewhere, someone had made a big mistake. “No one knows what happened down in Truro,” he said. “Clearly, some great error has been made somewhere along the way, at what stage and by whom I do not know.”

Mr Shelley added: “We were approached some years ago to see if any of our members would be interested in providing a valuation. We know from our records that three members responded to the advertisement we put in our bulletin.”

Mr Thornton, 74, an expert in theological books, told The Times that he had decided to retire after decades as a bookseller and has closed his terraced shop in Chelsea.

A cricket enthusiast, who is married with at least one child, he said that he had offered a fair price for the Phillpotts collection. “I was invited to make an offer to clear the books and two years later I took them away. It was difficult to give an accurate evaluation of the collection when we were asked to do so in 2004 because of the dimly lit and confined conditions in which they were held.

“As for any queries on the deal, I will wait and see what the lawyers say,” he said.

Volume sales

The Macklin Bible

A 10th-century cleric’s 63-volume Bible, thought to be one of the largest in the world, was sold at auction last December for £47,000. A Macklin Bible, produced in 1800 and bound in six or seven volumes, normally sells for £500-£800. This edition was unique because the Rev Franke Parker, rector of Luffincott in Devon, had collected more than 9,000 Old Master prints and engravings to illustrate the text. He completed his project in 1883, rebinding the work into 63 volumes, each 20 inches tall, taking up 20 feet of shelf space. It was then acquiredby the Rt Rev Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, which covered Cornwall at that time. The Bible was one of the first items from the Bishop Phillpotts Library to come up for auction.

A 1470 edition of Josephus Flavius’s Antiquitates Judaicae

This book printed by Johann Schussler was sold at Sotheby’s for £78,000. The author was a Jewish historian whose native language was Aramaic but who wrote largely in Greek. The book, of navy Morocco with still gilt Greek key border, exhibited some fine coloured initials and border decoration

Franke Parker’s copy of the complete Bible in Greek, aldine edition of 1518

A fine example of woodcut initials and headpieces painted in red, it was sold at Sotheby’s for £60,000

An early 16th-century Polyglot Bible financed by Cardinal Jiminez de Cisneros

A monumental six-volume work, it was printed in the years 1514 to 1517 in the three Biblical languages of Greek, Hebrew and Latin. Sold for £69,600 at Sotheby’s

A 1653 Latin bible printed in Paris at the Typographia Regia

In a slightly faded and rubbed Morocco gilt binding bearing the arms of Louis XIV. It was acquired by Bishop Phillpotts in 1866 and was sold for £660 at Sotheby’s

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