Unpublished hand-made book by JK Rowling sold at Sotheby’s for £1.95 mln

One of just seven copies of a new work by JK Rowling, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, sold at Sotheby’s Thursday for an unprecedented GBP 1,950,000. Created, hand-written and illustrated by JK Rowling, the volume of previously untold stories attracted pre-sale interest from all corners of the world.

Six bidders locked horns in a battle to secure it – the hammer finally falling to a representative from London fine art dealers Hazlitt Gooden & Fox. 

Proceeds from the sale will go to The Children’s Voice – a campaign run by the Children’s High Level Group, the charity JK Rowling co-founded in 2005 with Emma Nicholson MEP that seeks to make life better for vulnerable children across Europe.

The price is the highest ever achieved at auction for a modern literary manuscript, an auction record for a work by JK Rowling, and an auction record for a children’s book.

Speaking after the sale, the author of the Harry Potter collection said: “I am stunned and ecstatic. This will mean so much to children in desperate need of help. It means Christmas has come early for me.”

“This is one of the most exciting pieces of children’s literature to have passed through Sotheby’s. We have to reach back 80 years to find a comparison when we sold the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on behalf of the original Alice,” said Dr. Philip Errington, Deputy Director, Sotheby’s Books and Manuscripts department.

Containing clues that were to prove crucial to Harry Potter’s final mission to destroy Lord Voldemort’s Horcruxes, The Tales of Beedle the Bard is the volume of five wizarding fairy-tales left to Hermione Granger by Albus Dumbledore in the seventh and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Only one – The Tale of the Three Brothers – is recounted in the book. In Tales of Beedle the Bard, the four remaining tales are revealed for the first time.

Bound in brown morocco leather, and mounted with hand-chased silver ornaments and seven moonstones, the volume of five stories is one of just seven individual copies – each quite different from the other – hand-written and illustrated by JK Rowling.

In a dedication in the front of the book, she wrote: “Six of these books have been given to those most closely connected to the Harry Potter books during the last 17 years. This seventh copy will be auctioned; the proceeds to help institutionalised children who are in desperate need of a voice. So to whoever now owns this book, thank you – and fair fortune be yours!”

The five tales in The Tales of Beedle the Bard are: ‘The Fountain of Fair Fortune’, ‘The Warlock’s Hairy Heart’, ‘The Tale of the Three Brothers’, ‘The Wizard and the Hopping Pot’ and ‘Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump’.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the seventh and final of the Harry Potter books by JK Rowling. When the book was published on July 21, 2007, it broke all sales records as the fastest selling book ever. The Harry Potter books have sold over 350 mln copies worldwide and are translated into 65 different languages.