The woman hardly knew what she'd bought in paying 40 pence, or about 50 cents, for three books back in 1997. Then 26, the woman "didn't have much money" but liked to browse secondhand bookshops for deals, she tells Hansons Auctioneers. She'd been looking for novels by Agatha Christie but ended up buying an uncorrected proof copy of JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone as a "'throw-in' with a couple of other books" at a London shop, says the woman, now 52. "I don't think I even looked at it properly, to tell the truth," she say. Nearly three decades later, the book—"the very first appearance in print of the first Potter novel," according to Hansons expert Jim Spencer—has sold at auction for nearly $14,000, per CBS News.
The owner had carried the book with her as she traveled from China to Italy, but she never actually read it. "It ended up stuck behind a shelf in my bedroom," she says, until her children developed an interest in Harry Potter and "I went looking for it." Learning that early Harry Potter books were worth far more than she'd paid for her copy, the woman reached out to Hansons. Spencer said the proof marking "where the Harry Potter phenomenon began" was so raw, the author's name was misspelled on the title page as "JA Rowling."
It sold Monday to an anonymous buyer in the UK for nearly $14,000, per CBS. That's a little higher than typical. Online book marketplace AbeBooks reports "a handful of advance proof copies are available from $7,500 to $13,500." Still, the price is far shy of the $471,000 world-record auction price paid for a first-edition, hardcover copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 2021. One of just 500 copies printed by Bloomsbury, it became the most expensive commercially printed fictional book of the 20th century, according to Heritage Auctions. (More Harry Potter stories.)
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