UBC acquires rare edition of Harry Potter book
Librarians at the University of B.C. have waved their magic wand and conjured up a rare U.K. first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
But there was a fair bit of gold dust on the wand. The book cost US$36,500. In today’s exchange rate, that’s the equivalent of about $46,490. And as strange as that may sound, UBC got a good deal.
Chelsea Shriver, UBC Rare Books and Special Collections librarian, said the university had been watching one rare book auction where the most expensive copy of the first U.K. edition went for US$81,000 (about $105,000).
“As soon as (the auction) started, we realized that we were completely out of it,” she said.
The original print run of the first Harry Potter book 20 years ago in the U.K. was 500. Of those, 300 went to libraries. UBC went through a rare book dealer that was able to locate a copy formerly in a library collection.
In 2015, UBC started collecting complete sets of the U.S., U.K. and Canadian first editions of the Harry Potter series. The only one missing was the first U.K. edition of the first book.
“We wanted to make sure that we had the first Canadian, first U.S. and first U.K. edition of all the books because our children’s literature collection is American, British and Canadian,” Shriver said.
Shriver compared the Harry Potter series with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which has become a classic of children’s literature.