


The $105,000 sale granted Harry Potter two things: a built-in publicity hook, and a big budget. The first Harry Potter book wasn’t perfect, but it was magic But it only started to approach phenomenon levels when Scholastic bought the US publication rights for an astonishing $105,000, about 10 times more than the average foreign rights sale at the time. Harry Potter did fine when it first emerged in the UK 20 years ago, winning a Smarties Award and garnering respectable sales for its publisher, Bloomsbury. Harry Potter’s US publication made it a bonafide phenomenon Here’s a look back at the way Harry Potter changed and influenced online fandom, millennial culture, and the publishing industry. And it introduced an entire generation to the idea that it’s possible to interact with the pop culture you love - to write about it and with it, to make music and art about it, and to build a business around it. It changed the business model for publishing books for kids.

Harry Potter made YA book-to-movie franchises into one of the biggest forces in pop culture. Rowling was an unknown single mom when she first got the idea for her story while stuck on a train the small UK children’s press that ultimately took a chance on it undoubtedly couldn’t have predicted that it would have a measurable effect on everything it touched. But Harry Potter changed the world.Īuthor J.K. Harry Potter has since became such an all-encompassing phenomenon that from this vantage point, it’s hard to see the full scope what it accomplished: It feels as though publishing and fandom and children’s literature and all of pop culture have always been the way we know them today. "Not only is it the most expensive Harry Potter book ever sold, it’s the most expensive commercially published 20th-century work of fiction ever sold," Heritage Auctions Executive Vice President Joe Maddalena said in a statement.Almost exactly 20 years ago, on September 1, 1998, Scholastic published Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first US edition of the UK’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Previous auction prices for Harry Potter first editions have ranged from about $110,000 to $138,000. The final price was more than six times the pre-sale estimate of $70,000. The Dallas-based auction house said only 500 copies with the specific binding were printed. The book was published in the United States as "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." The hardback 1997 British edition of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone," with a color illustration on the cover, was described by Heritage Auctions as "magical, incredibly bright and so very near pristine." LOS ANGELES, Dec 9 (Reuters) - A first edition of "Harry Potter" sold for $471,000 in the United States on Thursday in what the auctioneers said was a world record price for a 2Oth century work of fiction.
