The Hindu : Front Page : Rowling’s latest is here

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Rowling’s latest is here

Severin Carrell

Book of fairy tales penned for friends hits shops

— Photo: C. Ratheesh Kumar

BOOK EVENT: Harry Potter fans look at the latest arrival from J.K. Rowling, in Thiruvananthapuram on Thursday.

LONDON: When the clock struck midnight, bookshops here on Thursday began to sell the Harry Potter phenomenon’s latest instalment, a modest collection of fairy stories that is expected to put J.K. Rowling at the top of the bestseller list once again this Christmas.

Booksellers sought to mark the publication of The Tales of Beedle the Bard — a set of short stories that featured in the final Harry Potter novel — by arranging events such as children’s tea parties and breakfast readings. There was an exclusive party a few hours before sales started here for 500 hardcore Harry fans. Rowling herself was hosting a tea party for 220 primary school children in Edinburgh in the afternoon.

The collection is a reprint of five fairy stories that Rowling originally hand-wrote and illustrated on vellum as a gift for six close friends associated with the Potter oeuvre. All six versions were hand-bound, their covers inlaid with semi-precious stones. The stories are derived from a magical book used by Harry finally to defeat his adversary Lord Voldemort in the seventh and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which was the fastest-selling book ever.

Unlike the profits from the novels in the core Harry Potter series, the proceeds from …Beedle the Bard are going to an east European children’s charity chaired by Rowling, called the Children’s High Level Group. Based on a European Commission-backed organisation of the same name run by Member of the European Parliament Emma Nicholson to coordinate efforts to provide new homes to 100,000 Romanian children kept in appalling conditions in state institutions, the charity focusses on rebuilding children’s services in five east European countries.

The seven Harry Potter novels have sold 400 million copies worldwide and spawned five movies, helping to build their small publishers, Bloomsbury, into a major force in the book industry. Bloomsbury hopes to sell between 7.5 million and eight million copies worldwide from the first print run of …Beedle the Bard, which is already translated into 27 languages, raising at least £12 million for the children’s charity.

Rowling said she hoped the book would “not only be a welcome present to Harry Potter fans, but an opportunity to give these abandoned children a voice. It will encourage young people across the world to think about those who are less fortunate, and help change many young lives for the better.”

The Tales of Beedle the Bard has already raised at least £1.9 million for the charity after Amazon won the bidding at a Sotheby’s auction for the seventh and last handwritten version of the book last year, donated by Rowling. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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