The watercolor of the original cover of ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’, the first image ever conceived of the ‘boy who lived’, will go up for auction in NY the next June 26th by the house of Sotheby’s.
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The illustration, made in 1997 for him British artist Thomas Taylor, will be auctioned with an estimated price of between 400,000 and 600,000 dollars (between 370,000 and 560,000 euros), thus becoming the ‘Harry Potter’ item with the most expensive starting price at auction.
In 2001, when only four volumes of the saga had been published, the painting was auctioned in London for 85,750 pounds (about 100,000 euros).
The design shows a disoriented harry potter in the famous platform 9 and three quarters, with the ‘Hogwarts Express’ on his back and a scarf with the colors of ‘Gryffindor’, the house to which the character belongs in the magic school.
This is the first image of Harry Potter that the world saw, and it comes directly from the imagination of Thomas Taylor, one of the first people to read the book before its publication under the English publisher Bloomsbury.
To show the publisher that he had read the story, the illustrator decided to include a small clue on the cover: “When you look at his scarf, you realize he’s wearing the Gryffindor colors, but on the platform he hasn’t worn the sorting hat yet,” Kalika Sands, Sotheby’s international specialist in books and manuscripts, explains to EFE.
Although then the project JK Rowling had been rejected by a dozen publishers, ‘Harry Potter’ ended up becoming a global phenomenon which sold about 500 million copies worldwide and was translated into 80 languages.
“The saga is historical. I think the best thing about it is that there is a whole new generation of readers who continue to read it. In the years that have passed since the illustration was made, ‘Harry Potter’ has created its own world,” says the Sotheby’s expert.
Watercolor is part of the Rodney P. Swantko collection, an American dentist who was also a “fantastic collector of rarities” that will also go up for auction, such as some manuscripts of Edgar Allan Poe or the first edition of ‘Beautiful and Damned’, by the renowned writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.
“The fact that he collected this kind of thing and at the same time recognized ‘Harry Potter’ as something special is a real credit to his eye as a collector,” Sands says.
From his bookstore, Sotheby’s too will auction a copy of ‘The Tales of Beedle the Bard’ on June 26, handwritten by JK Rowling herself, as well as one of the first 500 hardcover copies of ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’.
The watercolor of the original cover of ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’, the first image ever conceived of the ‘boy who lived’, will go up for auction in New York on June 26 by Sotheby’s.
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