Sotheby’s recently sold a handwritten volume of five stories by JK Rowling for an eye-popping £1,95-million, writes Mark Brown.
By any standards it was a lot to shell out just to get clues as to how one destroys Lord Voldemort: Sotheby’s recently sold a handwritten volume of five stories by JK Rowling for an eye-popping £1,95-million when the top-end estimate had been £40 000.
The author said Christmas had come early after six bidders stunned the London auction house by pushing the price of her work, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, up and up. Proceeds from the sale now go to the charity that Rowling co-founded, The Children’s Voice, which aims to improve life for vulnerable children across Europe.
The sale set auction records for a modern literary manuscript, a children’s book and any work by Rowling.
The brown morocco leather volume, mounted with hand-chased silver ornaments and seven moonstones, is one of just seven individual copies, each one different. The winning bidder was a representative from the fine-art dealers Hazlitt Gooden and Fox.
Rowling said: ‘I am stunned and ecstatic. This will mean so much to children in desperate need … It means Christmas has come early for me.”
Philip Errington, Sotheby’s deputy director in its books and manuscripts department, said the only comparable sale was 80 years ago when the house sold the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on behalf of the original Alice.
The five stories are fairy tales left to Hermione Granger by Albus Dumbledore in Rowling’s seventh and final novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. —