Handmade Rowling Book Fetches Record Price

By Julia Eccleshare -- Publishers Weekly, 12/13/2007 7:28:00 AM

The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a handwritten and illustrated book by J.K. Rowling, has been sold for a record-breaking £1,950,000 at auction in London on Wednesday. It was bought by London fine art dealer Hazlitt Gooden & Fox, who secured it after a hard-fought bidding war between six serious bidders. The price, which outstrips any previously paid for a modern literary manuscript, stunned the room, which erupted into spontaneous applause. Sotheby’s “low estimate” had been only in the region of £30,000–£50,000, though they also recognized that as “a collectible” it was almost impossible to value.

The forward to The Tales of Beedle the Bard

und in brown Morocco leather and mounted with hand-chased silver ornaments and seven moonstones, this copy is one of just seven that Rowling created. The other six were given by Rowling to those who had been most closely involved with Harry Potter over the last 17 years, while this volume was put up for auction to raise money for The Children’s Voice, a campaign run by the Children’s High Level Group, the charity seeking to make life better for vulnerable children across Europe that Rowling co-founded in 2005 with Baroness Emma Nicolson.

Rowling, who had been in London earlier in the week for a pre-auction event at which she read one of the wizarding tales, spoke passionately of the charity and the work that it can do. After the sale she said, “I am stunned and ecstatic. This will mean so much to children in desperate need of help.”

Just before the sale Bloomsbury announced that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be published in paperback next July 5, in both a children’s and an adult edition. Scholastic has not announced a date for the U.S. paperback edition.

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