(New York) This is the original image of Harry Potter: the cover illustration for the first edition of volume 1 of the saga will be auctioned on Wednesday in New York for around half a million dollars.
In 1997, a 23-year-old illustrator, Thomas Taylor, who worked in a children’s bookstore in Cambridge, United Kingdom, was commissioned to create a watercolor for the cover of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Wizards) which is due to be released in London on June 26, 1997.
The print run is 500 copies.
Twenty-seven years later, after seven volumes, films, a play and a video game, the saga of British author J. K. Rowling has sold at least 500 million copies and been translated into 80 LANGUAGES.
Thomas Taylor was one of the first readers of the manuscript of volume 1, at the request of the British publisher Barry Cunningham of the small house Bloomsbury, explains to AFP Kalika Sands, specialist in old books at Sotheby’s, the large publishing house. art auction which is organizing the sale on June 26.
Estimated price of the original watercolor: $400,000 to $600,000.
“It’s the first visual representation of the wizarding world of Harry Potter,” with his round glasses, lightning bolt-shaped forehead scar and scarf, boarding the Hogwarts Express train, Sands said.
In 1997, J. K. Rowling and Thomas Taylor were complete unknowns and few people bet on the success of the first Harry Potter, 300 copies of which were distributed to libraries.
Over the months, word of mouth has become a legend.
“It’s exciting to see the painting that marked the start of my career, decades later, still as luminous,” said Thomas Taylor, quoted in a Sotheby’s press release, rejoicing that his “creation is now an emblematic image” of the little wizard with glasses and global success.
The illustration previously sold in 2001 for 85,750 pounds (about $108,500 at the current exchange rate).
Watercolor will be offered alongside old manuscripts and rare editions of the giants of British and American literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries: Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Edgar Allan Poe.
These books are part of an extraordinary collection of an American surgeon and bibliophile who died in 2022 at the age of 82, Rodney F. Swantko, and could break records.