By AFP
The original watercolor illustration from the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” the book that introduced the world to the young wizard with glasses, sold for $1.9 million.
The artwork becomes “the most valuable Harry Potter object ever sold at auction,” auction house Sotheby’s said in a statement.
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“The illustration was pursued by four telephone and online bidders for almost ten minutes before being sold to applause.”
EXCEEDS PRICE
The work by Thomas Taylor, who was just 23 in 1997 when he painted the iconic image of the boy with the lightning bolt scar and round glasses, was expected to fetch between $400,000 and $600,000 at Sotheby’s.
Taylor was working in a children’s bookshop in Cambridge, UK, when Bloomsbury publisher Barry Cunningham commissioned her to paint the image for JK Rowling’s book, which was due to go on sale in London on 26 June 1997.
According to Kalika Sands, a book specialist at Sotheby’s, she was one of the first people to read the book and received a first copy of the manuscript that served as the basis for her artistic work.
“So he knew the world before anyone else and it was he who had to think about how to visualise Harry Potter,” Sands told AFP ahead of the auction.
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Rowling and Taylor were unknown when the book was published, and few expected it to become a global phenomenon. Only 500 copies of the first edition were printed, and 300 of them were sent to libraries, according to Sotheby’s.
But the book soon became a runaway bestseller.
Now, 27 years later, the “Potter universe” includes Rowling’s seven original books, a blockbuster film franchise, a critically acclaimed play and video games.
More than 500 million copies have been sold in 80 languages.
The first time the illustration was offered at auction at Sothesby’s in London in 2001, it only fetched £85,750, about $108,500 at current exchange rates, but only four books in the series had been published by then.
