Harry Potter first edition featuring JK Rowling drawings sells for £150,000

Auction of tomes scribbled upon and annotated by their authors raises total of £440,000 for English Pen writers' association
Sotheby's First Editions Second Thoughts sale
Philip Errington of Sotheby's holds the Harry Potter first edition containing a commentary and 22 of the author's original illustrations. Photograph: Nick Ansell/PA

Harry Potter first edition featuring JK Rowling drawings sells for £150,000

Auction of tomes scribbled upon and annotated by their authors raises total of £440,000 for English Pen writers' association

A first edition copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, with author JK Rowling's notes and original illustrations, was sold for £150,000 at auction in London.

The book, which was auctioned by Sotheby's at a charity sale in aid of the English Pen writers' association, was purchased by an anonymous bidder by telephone.

The annotations by Rowling include comments on the process of writing and a section from an early draft of the novel, along with a number of illustrations drawn by her and a note on how she came to invent Quidditch, a sport played by characters in the books.

She and others had been asked to "scribble second thoughts, marginalia or drawings" on a first edition copy of one of their books for the event, which raised £439,200 in total.

A copy of Roald Dahl's bestselling children's book Matilda, containing new drawings by illustrator Quentin Blake, fetched £30,000, while an annotated copy of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day went for £18,000.

In other lots, a copy of Julian Barnes's Metroland sold for £14,000, a copy of Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader fetched £11,000 and a copy of Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist was bought for £17,000. A copy of Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing was sold for £15,500.

The event was attended by a number of authors whose works were featured, including Toibin, Helen Fielding, Jeanette Winterson, Frederick Forsyth, Ben Okri, Margaret Drabble, Andrea Levy, David Lodge, John Banville, Justin Cartwright and Wendy Cope.

Rick Gekoski, a rare book dealer and trustee of English Pen, curated the collection of annotated first editions for the sale.

He said: "This is a triumphant conclusion to a wonderful project, which has involved the hard work and good will of so many people. I am sure that the buyers of the individual books will be thrilled with their purchases."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/22/annotated-harry-potter-first-edition-auctioned
www.theguardian.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-39
493289
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:GMKJEQKPIF3XB4VIW5BHVOXZAH2ITGKI
<urn:uuid:70f9e31a-1806-4230-9777-f3507d000ce1>
2017-09-25T02:28:36Z
151.101.33.111
text/html
sha1:SJRIM47C3D2OIUZS7IQP35YHV6ZFK7IP
<urn:uuid:b52e4160-e8bc-49e0-91d2-ce0811ece544>
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/22/annotated-harry-potter-first-edition-auctioned
response
<urn:uuid:49b75381-4d9d-4fb4-867d-9547ddbf4f34>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-79-213-170.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-39
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf