Los Angeles (E! Online) - Amazon.com has sold millions of J.K. Rowlings books. Now the Internet giant is spending millions to get the authors latest tome.
Amazon.com has confirmed it anted up a whopping $4 million Thursday to win the bidding for The Tales of Beedle the Bard at a Sothebys auction. The leather-bound book is personally illustrated by the author and one of just seven copies created.
While Beedle is not technically a Harry Potter book, it does play a role in the final installment of the saga, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Professor Dumbledore bequeaths the collection of fairy tales to Hermione Granger, and one of its five yarns, The Tale of the Three Brothers, contains an important clue to defeating the evil Lord Voldemort.
The Tales of Beedle the Bard is really a distillation of the themes found in the Harry Potter books, and writing it has been the most wonderful way to say goodbye to a world I have loved and lived in for 17 years, Rowling wrote in the auctions catalog.
Rowling, 42, gave the first half-dozen copies of Beedle as gifts to those instrumental in making Harry Potter a worldwide sensation.
But she decided to put the last copy on the block to help fund the Childrens Voice, a charity aiding institutionalized youth across Europe that Rowling cofounded in 2005.
To hype the auction, she gave a one-time only public reading of the tales.
The auction drew a standing-room-only crowd, that erupted in applause as the bidding passed the million-pound mark. London art agent Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox purchased the volume on behalf of Amazon.
The winning bid was more than 40 times the minimum selling price of $100,000; the auction house claims the amount is the highest ever for a literary manuscript.
We have to reach back 80 years to find a comparison when we sold the manuscript of Alices Adventures in Wonderland on behalf of the original Alice, Philip Errington, Sothebys book expert, told Londons Times.
J.K. Rowling had done the world a rare and immeasurably valuable service--enlarging forever our concept of the way books can touch people--and in particular children--in modern times, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, said in a statement.
Rowlings Potter books have been translated into over 65 languages and sold nearly 400 million copies worldwide, with Hallows ranking as the biggest-selling book of all time.
Rowling, who watched the auction via the Web from her home in Edinburgh, was stunned and ecstatic.
This will mean so much to children in desperate need of help. It means Christmas has come early to me, she said in a statement.
Shortly after the purchase, Amazon posted images of Beedle online, including the cover, and some of Rowlings elegant runes and drawings. The site created a message board to answer questions on the book from fans.
Amazon also published a review of one of the stories, The Wizard and the Hopping Pot (Rowling has always made her stories as funny as they are clever, and The Wizard and the Hopping Pot is no exception) and announced plans to take Beedle on the road, touring libraries and schools.
Finally, the Web retailer reprinted Rowlings simple, etched dedication.
Six of these books have been given to those most closely connected to the Harry Potter books during the last 17 years. This seventh copy will be auctioned, the proceeds to help institutionalized children who are in desperate need of a voice. So, to whoever now owns this book, thank you--and fair fortune be yours!
