£2m for Einstein’s ‘God’ letter...and a wizard £126k for Harry Potter book

EINSTEIN’S famous letter giving his views on God has sold for more than £2million – a record for a letter by the physicist.

The figure dwarfed the price paid at the same sale for a rare edition of JK Rowling’s debut novel. Selling for £126,750, the signed first edition of Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone still broke the world auction record for the series.

However, Einstein’s “God Letter” fetched an incredible £2,256,150 at Christie’s in New York. Manuscript specialist Christina Geiger paid almost double its expected sale value of £1.2million after a four-minute bidding war over the phone.

Aged 74, the Nobel Prize winner penned the famous note to philosopher Eric Gutkind in 1954, a year before he died.

The letter in his native German read: “The word God is nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.” The letter was seen as proof that the renowned thinker was an atheist – a claim he later rejected.

On the Harry Potter book, a spokesman for Christie’s said: “While the story of the boy wizard would go on to take the world by storm, Rowling was unknown on its first publication.

“Only 500 copies were printed of the initial run, 300 of which went to libraries.”

Meanwhile, Charles Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species fetched £126,750, with Christie’s making £4.23million in total at the December auction.