An act of charity? Simply a tax write-off? A brilliant marketing move? Those are the questions being asked of Amazon.com after several of Amazon's discussion board members learned of Amazon's purchase at auction recently of a hand-made copy of J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard. The auction took place at Sotheby's in London.
The wizarding fairy tale, "The Tale of the Three Brothers" is recounted in the the last book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Four other untold tales are included in the book.
The winning bid, made on behalf of Amazon by London's Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox, was £1,950,000 or $3,935,092.33 by today's rate of exchange, surpassing the second highest bid of about $3.8M. In a pre-sale announcement Sotheby's had suggested a bidding range of £30,000-50,000 or in the neighborhood of $200,000.
Rowling says she's donating the proceeds to the Children's Voice campaign, an arm of the Children's High Level Group, a charity she co-founded in 2005 with the Baroness Emma Nicholson of Winterbourne, that helps improve the lives of children across Europe who are institutionalized. She says the children are in "desperate need of a voice." CHLG focuses on children's issues, including health, education and welfare.
The auctioned book was the last of seven created by Rowling. The first six copies were given to "those mostly connected to Harry Potter books during the last 17 years," her spokesman said.
 Photos provided by Amazon.com
Illustrated and handwritten by Rowling herself, the 157-page book is bound in brown Moroccan leather embellished with five hand-chased sterling silver ornaments and mounted moonstones. The first story, "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot" is reviewed by Daphne Durham for Amazon. She says in part:
Rowling has always made her stories as funny as they are clever, and "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot" is no exception; the image of a one-footed cooking pot plagued with all the "warty" ills of the village, hopping after a selfish young wizard, is a good example. But the real magic of this book and this particular tale lies not just in her turns of phrase but in the way she underlines the "clang, clang, clang" of the pot for emphasis, and how her handwriting gets messier when the story picks up speed, like she's hurrying along with the reader. These touches make the story uniquely her own and this volume of stories particularly special.
An Amazon spokesperson announced that the company will plan to tour libraries and schools with the book.
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