This is the original image of Harry Potter: the illustration for the cover of 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.” the Sorcerer’s School”) 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 JK Rowling has sold at least 500 million copies and has 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 Kalika Sands, specialist in antiquarian books at Sotheby’s, the large auction house of works of art which is organizing the sale on June 26.
Estimated price of the original watercolor: from 400,000 to 600,000 dollars. “This is the first visual representation of the wizarding world of Harry Potter“, with his round glasses, his lightning bolt scar on his forehead and his scarf, boarding the Hogwarts Express train, according to Ms. Sands.
In 1997, JK Rowling and Thomas Taylor were complete unknowns and few people bet on the success of the former.Harry Potter“, 300 copies of which were distributed to libraries. Over the months, word of mouth made its legend.
“It’s exciting to see the painting that marked the start of my career, decades later, still so bright“, welcomed Thomas Taylor, quoted in a press release from Sotheby’s, rejoicing that his “creation is now an iconic image” from the little wizard with glasses to global success.
The illustration had already sold in 2001 for 85,750 pounds (around 108,500 dollars at the current exchange rate). The watercolor will be offered with 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.
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