Since it was released last December J K Rowling faced criticism over her decision to make her “goodbye to Harry Potter”, The Tales of the Beedle The Bard, only available to the rich few.
For those of you unaware of the hand written, collectors item of wizardry tales, bound in leather looked more like an antique than something you’d read on the bus.
The book itself played a key role in the conclusion of the Deathly Hallows, the last Potter tale. Professor Dumbledore bequeathed this collection of fairy tales compiled by a 15th-century bard– the wizard world equivalent of the Grimm brothers – to Hermoine, with the hope that she would find it “entertaining and instructive”.
In addition to 7 hand written copies, penned by Rowling herself, six were given away by as gifts, and one was put up for auction. Sotheby’s, where the book went on sale in December 2007, predicted it would go for between £30,000 and £50,000 but it ended up being bought for almost $4 million (£1.6 million) by Amazon.
Since then, pressure’s been mounting, from Harry Potter fans, who’ve been calling for the book to be made available at a more affordable price. Rowling spoke herself about how she finally came to realise that she should put her book up for a more general release.
At a party in Edinburgh to officially mark the book’s relaunch, she told of the part her fans played in her decision: “There was quite a lot of high feeling from Harry Potter fans that only someone who had two million pounds could afford to read the book. I thought ‘fair point’, so I thought ‘I’ll publish it and then the charity can have that money too.”
This time around, the book is being published by J.K. Rowling’s children’s charity The Children’s High Level Group in conjunction with Bloomsbury, Scholastic, with the support of Amazon and the blessing of the other six people who have the other original six copies which were given away as gifts.
Founded in 2005 by the author, The Children’s High Level Group (CHLG) aims to help children across Eastern Europe, Romania, Czech Republic, Georgia and Amernia living in residential homes. This time with a print run of over 7.5 million, the profits from Beedle the Bard will likely topple the amount Amazon trumped up for it the first time around.
And if the launch figures from the last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and The Deathly Gallows are anything to go by, sales this time will be huge again. It broke sales records on both sides of the Atlantic, selling 11 million copies in the first 24 hours of its release and turned out to be the most successful book launch ever.
With The Tales of Beedle the Bard, we get the usual traditional fairy tales spun on their head that Rowling does so effortlessly. There are witty characters, magical situations and an other worldliness that makes all the Potter books such a monstrous success.
