Clanger helps £1 Potter book sell for £28k

A RARE first edition of Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone – which was bought for £1 at a tabletop sale – has fetched £28,500 at auction.

The 1997 edition of the first in JK Rowling’s seven-part series was discovered by auctioneer Jim Spencer in a banana box full of books.

The hardback, pictured, of which only 500 copies were published by Bloomsbury, was sold to an anonymous bidder at Bishton Hall in Staffordshire yesterday – marking Miss Rowling’s 54th birthday.

Around 300 of these first editions went to libraries at the time. Auctioneer Charles Hanson said: ‘It was a magical moment... and [it] is an investment like no other.’

Mr Spencer said he was in ‘disbelief’ when he found the copy – which he described as the ‘Holy Grail for book collectors’.

He said: ‘It is something that is always on your radar, and you are thinking, “will I ever turn one up?” I was pretty shocked.

‘I must get two or three calls a week saying, “I have got a Harry Potter first edition”, but you can generally put most to bed and rule them out within half a minute.’

Mr Spencer, who spotted the copy after he was called to a client’s house in Staffordshire to value three boxes of books, said experts looked for ‘issue points’ to determine if it was genuine. He noticed a printing error in a list of Harry’s school ‘supplies’. The repetition of ‘1 wand’ in the list was corrected in later editions – confirming this was an original. The word ‘philosopher’ was also initially spelt wrongly on the back.

The book’s owner, 54, who asked not to be named, said: ‘I bought it along with three or four others to read on holiday about 20 years ago. I thought nothing of it at the time.’