DALLAS — An American collector is lighter in the wallet but ready for Hogwarts.
A rare first edition of J.K. Rowling’s "Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone" sold for over $400,000 at a Dallas auction house Thursday, breaking the modern-literature world record.
The final price was $471,000, purchased by a "private American collector from the Midwest," according to Heritage Auctions in Dallas.
More information about the buyer was not available.
The estimated price for the book was $50,000-$70,000, but it's no surprise the sale price was more than that. Live bidding started at $75,000, and two other first-edition Harry Potter books sold for more than $138,000 this year.
While the Harry Potter series is one of the most popular of all time, it didn't start out that way.
A dozen publishers rejected Rowling's debut novel, so Bloomsbury printed 500 hardback copies of the "Philosopher's Stone," later released in print and on film as the "Sorcerer's Stone."
The Harry Potter books eventually took off, but those initial 500 copies have been hard to come by. Only a few have surfaced in auctions, according to Heritage.
The opening bid was $120,000. Soon, the auction was above $300,000.
Watch Heritage's video of the auction on Thursday:
The Harry Potter sale was the headliner for Heritage's rare books auction this week, though several other famous titles also sold, including J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings Triology" ($103,125), C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia" titles ($100,000), and Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon" ($47,500).
Here's the full release from Heritage with sale prices of other rare-edition books sold at auction this week.
