Harry Potter book bought in a book café for £8 sells for £55,000

A Scottish woman who purchased a Harry Potter book for just £8 – having knocked the asking price down from £10 because it didn’t have a dust jacket on it – has seen it sell at auction for an eye-watering £55,104.

The unnamed seller picked up her amazing treasure from a remote Scottish bookshop café, whilst on a family caravan holiday, unaware at the time that it was one of only 500 first issue hardbacks of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which is the first in the series of fantasy novels about the boy wizard, written by JK Rowling.

The 58-year-old woman had seen it in what she described as a “bargain bucket” back in 1997, and picked it out after seeing an interview with the little known author in a local newspaper a few days earlier.

Of the 500 first issue hardbacks printed, 300 of them went to schools and libraries in order to reach a bigger audience, meaning that this book is part of the even rarer 200 that found their way into bookshops.

The novel went under the hammer at Hansons Auctioneers, based in Etwall, near Derby and was bought by a private UK online buyer.

 Relatively unknown

The naturally thrilled vendor, who is a retired manager, explained how she had made the purchase quite some time before anybody really knew too much about the story, or indeed the author.

It was during a break with her then young family, which took in the Scottish highlands, that she stumbled across the book café on an isolated peninsula, near Wester Ross, after driving miles up a single-track road.

“Bargain” became a bigger bargain

It was sat in a wicker basket marked up for £10, the woman recalled. She said: “Because it had no dust jacket, I got a couple of pounds knocked off the price.”

She reminised that her two children enjoyed the wizards tale as a bedtime story, all the way through that particular holiday in the west of Scotland, oblivious obviously back then, that she had inadvertently landed herself a wonderful investment.

Starting to believe

The seller, who actually lives just north of Edinburgh, which is where J K Rowling wrote the first Potter book, added that her now grown up children had told her that they had read something online about how to identify first editions and having inspected the book, believed that her copy could be one of them.

However, she said she doubted its value due to the fact that it was missing its dust jacket, but then later learned that those early editions were released WITHOUT the attachment.

She stored the book away in a cupboard for many years, until reading sometime later about the rarity of the first editions. It was at that point she decided to contact the Harry Potter book expert: Jim Spencer, to get clarification.

Authentication leads to mammoth sale

Based at Hansons Auctioneers, Mr Spencer was able to authenticate the book’s first edition status and said: “This was a genuine, honest first issue and a fantastically well-preserved example.”

 He continued: “These first issues are getting harder and harder to find. This must be one of the few remaining copies that’s been in private hands since it was purchased in 1997.”

 He explained that most examples of that first batch are actually quite badly worn, especially the ex-library copies, due to the fact that they have often been shared among friends and carried around in school bags.

 However, the auction house expert confirmed that the hardback was one of the rarest and most prized Potter books, and was regarded as the “holy grail” for collectors.