Media

Secret buyer pays £

The Times
December 14 2007
Author: Dalya Alberge

J. K. Rowling’s final goodbye to Harry Potter yesterday raised £ 2 million at auction in London -40 times its pre-sale estimate.

An anonymous collector, bidding through a dealer who usually specialises in Old Masters, paid £ 1.95 million for The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a 160-page
Potter spin-off of five “wizarding fairy tales” that relate to his final adventure. The proceeds will go to the charity Children’s Voice.

The book was estimated to go for between £30,000 to £50,000. Rowling handwrote and illustrated just seven copies of The Tales, each the size of a
paperback. This one was bound in brown morocco leather and mounted with semi-precious stones and silver.

Rowling has given the other six copies to people “most closely connected” to producing the Potter books. Whether they include Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter in the films, or Christopher Little, the agent who discovered her when she was a penniless single mother in Edinburgh in the early 1990s, remains to be seen.

Yesterday, the chance to buy a new and unpublished 5,500-word Rowling book was a bibliophile’s dream, sparking frenzied bidding -even though no-one has been allowed to read it.

As the Sotheby’s auctioneer opened the bidding, a white-gloved porter held up the book at the front of the room. There were five or six players, all
concealing their identity by bidding through someone in the room or through a member of Sotheby’s staff on the phone.

At £1 million, there was applause from the room, and murmurings of astonishment as six-figure increases were tossed around the rooms.

A few children in the saleroom jumped with excitement as the hammer came down on the final bid, but the man at the back who bought it could not have looked more miserable as he scurried off into the street muttering “no comment”.

He was John Morton Morris from Hazlitt Gooden & Fox, based in St James’s. Perhaps he was representing a client, some noted buyer of Rubens and Rembrandts, who needed a third “R” in his collection -a Rowling.

Afterwards, Rowling said: “I’m stunned and ecstatic. Christmas has come early for me.”

Rowling founded Children’s Voice with the MEP Baroness Nicholson two years ago to campaign for the rights of European children, particularly in eastern
Europe where more than one million institutionalised young people are trapped in inhumane conditions.

The author said: “It’s a huge, silent scandal how many children within Europe are institutionalised -a child with mental health issues who has been taken from their family or given by the family to an institution and then placed in a cage.”

Rowling penned The Tales a few months after the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final novel.

The Tales played a central role in it. Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, bequeathed a volume containing five wizard fairytales to Harry’s
friend Hermione Granger. It offered clues to help Harry defeat his great enemy, Lord Voldemort.At the moment, the author has no plans to publish The Tales and retains the copyright.

Potter addicts will have to make do with a special auction catalogue, costing between £ 6 and £ 8. Proceeds from those sales will also be donated to the
charity.