Is my Harry Potter book valuable? How to tell if your copy is a first edition

Is my Harry Potter book valuable? How to tell if your copy is a first edition

This comprehensive article will help you establish whether you have a first edition Harry Potter on your hands. If you do have a first edition and are interested in selling it, please contact us on our Sell To Us page.

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has gained immense popularity, critical acclaim and commercial success worldwide, and first editions of her books have very quickly become collectable. By far the most valuable book in the series is the first, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, published on 30 June 1997 by Bloomsbury in London.

But to have any real collectable value, it has to be a copy of the first edition, first impression (also known as the first printing). This means the very first batch of books off the press, of which there were only a few thousand.  Reprints of Philosopher’s Stone (and even first editions of the later books in the series) have much lower values, in part because so many more of them were printed.

Harry Potter first edition, softcover issue

First, what do the books look like? The first printing was bound in two different ways. The rarest is the hardback issue, with a cover of laminated boards. Only 500 copies were bound this way, and 300 of those were sent to libraries. Because library books receive so much wear and tear we are left with only 200 copies in potentially fine collectable condition, and these rarely appear on the market. The other binding was a regular paperback of which a few thousand copies were produced for sale.

Next , how do you tell whether your copy, which may look very similar to the one pictured above, is really a valuable first edition?

To be a first edition, in either hard or soft cover, there are four very important issue points, all of which your book must have:

1. The publisher must be listed as Bloomsbury at the bottom of the title page. See photo below:

2. The latest date listed in the copyright information must be 1997.

3. The print line on the copyright page must read “10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1”, ten down to one, exactly. The lowest figure in the print line indicates the printing. (For instance, if your copy has “20 19 18 17”, it’s a less valuable seventeenth printing.)

First edition number line.

You may have been told that you have a first printing if the copyright is in the name of “Joanne Rowling”, but that’s not true. All early printings of this title have the same copyright statement.

This is what the whole back of the title page should look like:

Back of title page in the first edition of Harry Potter.

4. On page 53, in the list of school supplies that Harry receives from Hogwarts, the item “1 wand” must appear twice, once at the beginning and once at the end. This mistake was corrected in the second printing of the book (although it re-appeared in some later printings).

Mistake on page 53.

5. On the back cover there is a missing “o” in “Philospher’s Stone”.

Philosopher’s spelled as Philospher’s with the missing “o”.

If your book meets all these requirements then congratulations, you have a first edition! Depending on the binding and condition, it could be worth anywhere from many hundreds to tens of thousands of pounds.  If you’re interested in selling it, or would like to have a custom protective box made to house it, then please contact us. To see the Harry Potter books we currently have for sale please click here.

Though both the paperback and hardback first editions of the Philosopher’s Stone are of value, this is not the case with the other books in the series. For the other titles, it is only the first hardback edition with the dust jacket that have collectable value. If you have a copy of one of these titles that meets all these requirements below, and that you would like to sell, please contact us.

Chamber of Secrets must have been published in 1998 by Bloomsbury with no mention of subsequent edition, publisher, or later date on the copyright page, and have a printing number sequence of “10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1”.

Chamber of Secrets first edition copyright page

Prisoner of Azkaban must have been published in 1999 by Bloomsbury with no mention of subsequent edition, publisher, or later date on the copyright page, and have a printing number sequence of “10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1”. The most valuable copies are the first issue, which must have “Joanne Rowling” as the author instead of “J. K. Rowling” on the copyright page, and a dropped line of text on page 7.

 

The last four titles in the series, Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows, must have the words “First Edition” printed on the copyright page. The print run for the first edition of all of the last four titles was very large, and as a result, even first edition copies in the dust jackets in fine condition are fairly commonly found, and not presently of high value. We are currently interested in acquiring signed copies only of these titles.

Goblet of Fire copyright page

Browse all currently-available Harry Potter books here.

Do Misprints or Typos Make a Book Valuable?

Do Misprints or Typos Make a Book Valuable?

One of the most common misconceptions about books is that misprints and typos make them rare or valuable. Unfortunately, while certain types of errors can contribute to a book’s collectability, these alone will not increase the value of an otherwise inexpensive misprinted books. Consider the following case:

The Sun Also Rises is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Widely considered to be Ernest Hemingway’s best book, it is also the founding text of the “Lost Generation” of writers who came of age during the First World War. This significance, combined with the small number of first editions available today (5,090 copies were printed and few have survived in collectible condition) is what makes it valuable.

First edition of The Sun Also Rises a rare example of misprinted books being more valuable because of the printing error.

First edition of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926). BOOK SOLD

So where do misprints and typos come in? In this case, an error on page 181 (“stoppped” instead of “stopped”) appears in only the earliest issue of the book and was quickly corrected by the printer. When accompanied by other signs, such as the correct date, publisher, and binding, it means that these misprinted books were one of the very first to be printed, making it more desirable to collectors.

On the other hand, any inexpensive reprint of the same book might contain a misprint. But if the edition is not particularly interesting or uncommon, and the order in which the book was published is not important, then the misprint is just a nuisance. It isn’t the typo alone that makes a book valuable, it’s what the typo indicates: how early a specific copy was published and how rare it is.

For a small number of very important books such as The Sun Also Rises, misprints can have an impact on value, but in most cases they don’t make a difference. To find out more about first editions, see our posts:

What is a First Edition?

You can browse our complete stock of first editions and signed books online, and if you have a rare book that you’d like to sell, please contact us.

The First Book on the Loch Ness Monster

The First Book on the Loch Ness Monster

First edition of The Loch Ness Monster and Others by Rupert T. Gould (1934).

Today we often laugh about the myths that have grown up around the Loch Ness Monster. Recalling all the hoaxes, we wonder how people could be so gullible. But when the first widely-reported sightings stoked a media frenzy in 1933 it was unclear what was happening and many people, journalists and scientists alike, believed it possible that some type of unusual animal could be living in the loch.

This led to the first ever book on the monster, The Loch Ness Monster and Others (BOOK SOLD), a 1934 collection of eyewitness accounts gathered by Rupert T. Gould (1890–1948), a renowned horologist and former Lieutenant Commander in the British Navy.

Rupert T. Gould, horologist and author of The Loch Ness Monster and Others.

The first major Loch Ness sighting was reported by a London man named George Spicer who claimed that on 22 July, 1933, while driving with his wife along the east side of Loch Ness, something like a “pre-historic animal” crossed the road ahead of them “carrying a lamb or small animal of some kind” in its mouth. Spicer’s detailed account was reported in the Inverness Courier a few weeks later and more sightings (many of which were anonymous) began pouring in. The first photograph purporting to be of the creature was taken by Hugh Gray in November of the same year. It was published in the Daily Record and Mail and reproduced as Plate I in Gould’s book:

The first photograph ever taken of the Loch Ness Monster.

The most famous photograph was taken the following spring, when a London gynaecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson snapped what became known as “The Surgeon’s Photograph”. Though later revealed as a hoax, this image fueled the mania surrounding the sightings, and is used on the dust jacket and as the frontispiece to Gould’s book.

The Surgeon’s Photograph of the Loch Ness Monster (1934).

Spurred on by these media accounts, Gould took it upon himself to investigate the mystery. He was already a well-known horologist: in 1923 he published The Marine Chronometer, “a book so thoroughly researched and well written that it still had no equal seventy-five years later” (ODNB), and in his free time he restored the Royal Observatory’s Harrison timekeepers, which had solved the problem of how to determine longitude at sea. (Gould was was played by Jeremy Irons in the 1999 television adaptation of Dava Sobel’s Longitude.) He amassed a large collection of typewriters, and extensive notes for a possible history of the machines. But he was also interested in mysteries and monsters, having written three books on similar subjects: Oddities (1928), Enigmas (1929) and The Case for the Sea Serpent (1930).

One of the first to systematically investigate the Loch Ness Monster, Gould set off from Inverness on a motorcycle on 14 November, 1938 and circled the Loch twice over a period of days. He interviewed as many witnesses as possible, including the Spicers, and investigated various theories for the sightings, such as the idea that the monster was a prehistoric creature, or perhaps a normal sea animal that had swum into the loch by accident.

The book which resulted from his travels is highly detailed and includes reports on all known sightings, including some that occurred prior to 1933. It’s also copiously illustrated; all three of the photographs then believed to be of the monster are included, in addition to numerous sketches based on eyewitness accounts:

The Loch Ness Monster as described by the Spicers.

Unfortunately, many of the sketches are more humorous than illuminating:

Others are tragically unconvincing:

One of the best things about our particular copy of the book is that a previous owner left annotations.

There’s a section of photographs of unidentified animals that have washed ashore on beaches around the world–Gould argued that these might be specimens of the same creature that was living in the loch. Below each image our anonymous, and skeptical, reader has scrawled “almost certainly basking shark” (though some appear to me as giant squid or other types of animals):

But their best contribution is this charming illustration in the conclusion:

As you can probably tell from the text in the photo above, Gould’s conclusion was that there was a creature living in Loch Ness. Though he was almost certainly incorrect, he should be remembered as one of the earliest and most thorough of Loch Ness investigators, whom we have to thank for the preservation of much information relating to the creature and the people who saw her.

I’m sorry to say that we don’t have a “Mysteries” section on our website, so I’ve put Nessie into the “Sciences” category, which you can browse here.