The original drawing that appeared on the cover of the first edition of the first part of the “Harry Potter” book series will be sold on Wednesday at a public auction organized by Sotheby’s in New York, with an estimated price of about half a million dollars.
In 1997, the illustrator Thomas Taylor, who was 23 years old and worked in a children’s library in the British city of Cambridge, was assigned the task of preparing a watercolor drawing for the cover of the book “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” which was scheduled to be published in London on June 26, 1997.
This novel by the British writer Jay Kay Rowling was followed by other parts, a total of seven today, translated into 80 languages, and sold at least 500 million copies over the course of 27 years, and was adapted into films, a play, and a video game.
Kalika Sands, a specialist in old books at Sotheby’s Auction House, pointed out that the painter Thomas Taylor was one of the first to read the manuscript of the first book, at the request of Barry Cunningham from the small Bloomsbury publishing house.
The price of Taylor’s original watercolor, which was offered for sale on June 26, was estimated at between 400,000 and 600,000 dollars.
Sands explained, “It is the first visual representation of the wizarding world” created by the “Harry Potter” novels, in which the young wizard appeared, with his round glasses, a lightning bolt-shaped scar on his forehead, and his scarf, as he boarded the “Hogwarts Express.”
A statement issued by Sotheby’s quoted Thomas Taylor, who was completely unknown to Rowling in 1997, as saying, “It is exciting to see that the painting that marked the beginning of my career is still shining decades later.” He expressed his happiness that his drawing “became a famous image” of the character Harry Potter, which achieved widespread international success.
This drawing was previously sold for 85,750 pounds sterling (about 108,500 dollars at the current exchange rate).
In addition to watercolors, the auction includes ancient manuscripts and rare editions of giants of British and American literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and Edgar Allan Poe.
These books belong to a distinguished collection owned by the American surgeon Rodney F. Swanko, who died in 2022 at the age of 82, and it is not unlikely that the auction for them will witness the setting of new records.
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