Even by her own standards it was a spellbinding show.
Even by her own standards it was a spellbinding show.
Another chapter in the JK Rowling legend was completed yesterday after a handwritten and illustrated book of the author's fairytales sold for a record-breaking £1.95m at auction in just 10 minutes.
The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which went under the hammer at Sotheby's in London, has become the most valuable modern literary manuscript in the world, overtaking Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which was sold for just over £1m in New York in 2004.
Yesterday's auction even pushes Rowling's works towards the same value as original William Shakespeare manuscripts. His First Folio: Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, sold for £2.8m at Sotheby's last year - making it the most expensive book of all time.
Rowling has an estimated personal fortune of £545m, and the proceeds from the sale of the book will go straight to The Children's Voice, the charity which she set up to help underprivileged children.
After the sale, Rowling, 42, said: "I am stunned and ecstatic. This will mean so much to children in desperate need of help. It means Christmas has come early for me."
The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which was expected to raise just £50,000 at auction, is a handsome publication bound in dark brown Moroccan leather, studded with seven moonstones and decorated with silver charms.
The volume of five stories which was sold yesterday is just one of seven copies in existence, the rest belonging to people close to Rowling and the Harry Potter story.
Containing clues that were to prove crucial to Harry Potter's final mission to destroy Lord Voldemort's Horcruxes, The Tales of Beedle the Bard is the volume of fairytales left to Hermione Granger by Albus Dumbledore in the seventh and final book, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows.
Only one - The Tale of the Three Brothers - is recounted in the book. In Tales of Beedle the Bard, the four remaining tales are revealed.
The book was sold at Sotheby's to London fine art dealers Hazlitt Gooden and Fox.
Bidding lasted about 10 minutes with four or five bidders in the room and the same number on phones. Applause broke out when bidding reached £1m and again at the end of the sale.
Dr Philip Errington, deputy director at Sotheby's books and manuscripts department, said of the sale: "We have to reach back 80 years to find a comparison when we sold the manuscript of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on behalf of the original Alice."
Before yesterday, the highest amount paid for a Harry Potter lot was £85,750 for Thomas Taylor's watercolour of the cover of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone, which was sold at Sotheby's in 2001.
The sale of Tales of Beedle the Bard also outweighs the previous highest bid for a children's book at auction, £686,306, paid for Carroll's working copy of Alice in Wonderland in 1998.
Rowling is reported to have written fantasy stories from when she was a child. She is famously said to have written the first Harry Potter in the cafes of Edinburgh while her daughter lay asleep in her pram.
