A set of first edition Harry Potter books signed by JK Rowling failed to sell at auction last week. On July 13, a Christie’s Valuable Books and Manuscripts auction in London presented a complete set of Harry Potter books, each of which were signed or inscribed by the author herself.
The extraordinary set was offered to the auction by Livraria Lello, a Portuguese bookshop dubbed ‘the most beautiful bookstore in the world’, with a portion of the proceeds going to Gloucestershire-raised Rowling‘s charity, the Lumos Foundation. It included an ultra-rare hardback first edition, first impression of the first instalment in the hugely popular series, ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone‘, complete with the ‘wand’ error on page 53 and the misspelling of ‘Philosopher’s’ on its back cover – the first version of its kind to go on sale in seven years.
Published over the course of a decade, from 1997 to 2007, the set of seven books were anticipated to fetch £100,000 to £150,000 at auction. Despite first editions of the first book selling for a fair amount of money in recent times, this particular set went unsold.
Read more:Harry Potter: Quidditch league changes sport’s name to distance itself from J.K. Rowling
Just seven months ago, in December 2021, a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone sold for over £356,000 at auction, whilst a signed first edition of the first book fetched over £220,000 at auction in June of this year, mere weeks before this ill-fated set went up for auction. The charity the sale of the books was hoped to support, Lumos, named after the light spell in Harry Potter, was founded by Rowling in 2005 to shed light on the root causes of family separation across the world, including poverty, conflict, and discrimination.
Families in Kenya, Moldova, Haiti, Jordan, Panama, and Colombia are supported by the charity. Lumos has pivoted its work in Ukraine and Moldova to reach vulnerable families caught up in the Ukraine crisis and provide them with food, medicine and hygiene supplies, in addition to reaching children with learning materials and psychosocial support.
This is not the first blow Rowling has been dealt recently, as it was announced that the sport of Quidditch will have its name changed to Quadball to distance it from the controversial author. Two reasons have been cited for the name change by three Quidditch organisations – the loss of ‘sponsorship and broadcast opportunities’ due to Warner Bros owning the copyright to the sport’s name, and Rowling’s ‘anti-trans positions’.
Due to this change, the organisations associated with the sport will be changing their names, too. Major League Quidditch and US Quidditch will now respectively be known as Major League Quadball and US Quadball. In the near future, it is anticipated that the International Quidditch Association will also be changing its name
The executive director of US Quadball, Mary Kimball, said in a statement reported by The Guardian: “In less than 20 years, our sport has grown from a few dozen college students in rural Vermont to a global phenomenon with thousands of players, semi-pro leagues and international championships. Our organizations are committed to continuing to push quadball forward.”
The sport’s new name, Quadball, refers to the number of balls on the field during games, as well as the number of player positions. 2005 was the year the once-fictional game was adapted into a real life sport and now 600 teams across the world play the sport in 40 different countries.
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