A Wizardly Gift: J.K. Rowling Manuscript Raises $3.8 Million for Charity
A hand-written illustrated manuscript by Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling fetched a record 1.95 million pounds ($3.8) at a Sotheby's auction in London on Thursday.
"The Tales of Beedle the Bard" was expected to fetch up to 50,000 pounds but ended up going for nearly forty times that figure in a 10- minute bidding session involving four or five on-site bidders and an
equal number on the phone
The sale set three auction records, including the highest price ever paid for one of Rowling's works, the most money fetched by a children's books, and the highest bid for a modern literary manuscript.
All money raised will go to The Children's Voice, a charity co- founded by Rowling in 2005, which provides assistance to vulnerable children in Europe.
There are seven extant copies of the manuscript, all bound in brown
leather and decorated with silver and moonstones. Rowling has given
the other six copies to persons who were close to her while she was
writing the books.
"The Tales of Beedle the Bard" was as a plot device in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and one of the fairy tales it contains was reproduced in that final volume of the popular children's series. Rowling says she has no plans to publish the remaining four tales and that she wrote the stories as "a wonderful way to say goodbye to a world I loved and lived in for 17 years."
The buyer was from Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, an arts dealer that primarily handles 19th Century French Old Masters and contemporary European works by living artists.
Rowling also said that she was half-way through a new children's book.
Posted by Christos Tsirbas
Reuters article about the sale
A children's charity to go along with Rowling's children's books...I like when things are congruent like that. Good for her and all the good she's done.
Posted by: Frank VanderSloot | March 12, 2008 at 01:43 PM