A collector’s family were surprised to get £10,500, or almost C$17,945, for a Harry Potter book that cost just 30 pence when bought.
The madness surrounding the British wizard has not abated over the years, as the result of this online auction conducted in the small English town of Lichefield demonstrates, the BBC reported on Tuesday.
A buyer in Los Angeles was able to get his hands on a rare copy of a first edition of “The Sorcerer’s Stone”, the first book in the saga released in 1997.
This edition had only been produced in 500 copies. Nearly 300 of them had been sent to libraries. It was by buying the book from the Wolverhampton library that the collector, now deceased, made a real bargain.
However, the story could have taken a completely different turn since the family believed they had lost the work during a move. All the collector’s books then ended up in “hundreds of boxes”, according to his sister.
“We knew he had gotten the book, but if asked to locate it, he couldn’t,” she told the BBC.