Top books for Christmas

J. K. Rowling’s final goodbye to Harry Potter raised £2 million at auction in London yesterday — 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 fairytales” that relate to his final adventure. The proceeds will go to the charity Children’s Voice.

At this price, with a length of 5,500 words, the rate per word is a remarkable £363.64. This could be easily surpassed, however, when the last surviving 13th-century copy of the Magna Carta is auctioned this month. It is expected to fetch £15 million — or £6,000 for each of its 2,500 words.

The Tales was estimated to go for between £30,000 and £50,000. Rowling handwrote and illustrated only seven copies, 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 six other copies to people “most closely connected” with 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.

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, of 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.” The writer founded Children’s Voice with the MEP Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne 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.

She 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 wrote 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 to 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.

Big bids

— Rubens’s The Massacre of the Innocents, sold in 2002 for £49.5m at Sotheby’s London

— The Guennol Lioness, estimated between $12 and $18m at Sotheby’s NY, sold for $57.16m (£31.61m), a record for any sculpture

— John Lennon’s 1965 Rolls-Royce Phantom V, estimated at $300,000, sold for $2.29m (£1.79m) at Sotheby’s NY in 1985

Source: Times database

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