J.K. Rowling’s hand-written book, Tales of Beedle the Bard, sold at auction in London today for nearly £2 million ($4 million), far more than the £50,000 ( $100,000) that had been estimated. The funds will go to The Children’s Voice, a charity co-founded by the author.
"The Tales of Beedle the Bard" is mentioned in the final Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," as a gift left by headmaster Albus Dumbledore to Harry's friend Hermione.
The London art dealers Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox bought the leather-bound volume, which has silver mounts and is inset with precious stones. It was illustrated in pen and ink by Rowling herself
“This will mean so much to children in desperate need of help,” Rowling said in a statement. The Children’s Voice works for children’s rights across Europe, particularly in the institutions of Eastern Europe, where children often are raised in deplorable conditions.
Rowling told the British Broadcasting Corporation that the book of fairytales had helped her say goodbye to Harry's world.
"It's not about Harry, Ron and Hermione, but it comes from that world," she told BBC radio in an interview broadcast Thursday. "So it's been therapeutic in a way."
Rowling said she was working on a new book, "a half-finished book for children that I think will probably be the next thing I publish."
On Wednesday, Rowling and the makers of the Harry Potter movies filed a lawsuit against RDR Books, a small U.S. publisher that plans to bring out a companion volume based on the Harry Potter Lexicon fan Web site.
Rowling has said she plans to produce her own encyclopedia of the wizarding world and says the book would infringe on her intellectual property rights.
Rowling created—by hand—seven copies in all of Beedle the Bard, a group of stories rooted in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Scholastic, 2007), the last book of her mega-successful series. She has said she presented the other six copies to individuals, not named, who were key to the success of the Potter series.
Rowling watched today’s Sotheby’s auction from her home in Edinburgh, Scotland, but was at hand at the London auction house earlier in the week to sign catalogues and to read aloud from “The Tale of Three Brothers,” one of the stories in the Beedle the Bard book.