A $69,000 First Edition ‘Harry Potter’ Book and 10 Other Novels on Your Bookshelf Worth A Lot of Money
Written by
Vance Cariaga
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Normally a book must date back at least to the middle of last century to be worth tens of thousands of dollars. The exception is Harry Potter, the bespectacled hero of Hogwarts who burst upon the scene in the late 1990s when author J.K. Rowling finally found a publisher willing to take a chance on the fantasy series. A first edition copy of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” printed in 1997, sold for more than £55,000 (about $69,000) earlier this week, CBS News reported.
Apparently, the person who sold the book through Hansons Auctioneers found it in a bargain bin in Scotland 26 years ago and paid £10 for it, or about $12-$13. This was a particularly rare book because only 500 copies were printed in the first run of hardbacks. Of those, 300 went to schools and libraries, leaving just 200 for distribution to bookshops.
“This was a genuine, honest first issue and a fantastically well-preserved example,” Hansons’ book expert Jim Spencer told CBS News. “It was fresh to market and it deserved to go full steam like the Hogwarts Express.”
The seller, who chose not to be identified, learned about Harry Potter after reading one of Rowling’s first interviews.
“I bought the “Harry Potter” book before anyone really knew much about it, or the author,” the seller said in a Hansons Auctioneers news release. “I found it during a family caravan trip touring ’round the highlands of Scotland.”
She got a couple of dollars knocked off the price because the book had no dust jacket. It wasn’t until much later, when the woman’s children told her about the value of first-edition Potter books, that she understood how much her copy might be worth.
“But I said the edition was worthless due to it having no dust jacket. Some time later I learned the book was never released with a dust jacket,” the seller said. “At that point, we stored the book away. It lived like the young Harry Potter did, in the cupboard under the stairs.”
As CBS News noted, the book was re-titled “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” for American audiences and was published by Scholastic in the U.S. in 1998, with an initial printing of 50,000 copies.
The Harry Potter book is easily the most recent of books rated among the most valuable by Reader’s Digest. Some of the books on that list date back centuries, such as “First Folio” by William Shakespeare (worth $5.2 million) and the Gutenberg Bible ($5.39 million). A couple were published in the 1950s: “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger and “Casino Royale” by Ian Fleming.
In terms of novels and other works of long fiction, here are 10 first editions with very high values on the collectibles market, according to Reader’s Digest:
- “The Canterbury Tales” by Geoffrey Chaucer: $11.2 million
- “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll: $2 million-$3 million
- “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens: $850,000
- “Ulysses” by James Joyce: $355,000
- “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien: $210,000
- “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald: $194,000
- “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen: $180,159
- “Casino Royale” by Ian Fleming: $130,000
- “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” by Beatrix Potter: $56,124
- “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger: $40,000-$75,000
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