Author J.K. Rowling is publishing her own drawings, and those of her original illustrator, Thomas Taylor, in a new 25th-anniversary edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Taylor, whose career was launched by the book’s famous cover, was among the first to read it. (It has to date sold more than 500 million copies.) He used Rowling’s original manuscript and drawings as a guide to create the images of the characters we recognize today. A selection of both sets of images will be published in this limited edition, which will be published on June 9.
One of J.K. Rowling’s original illustrations for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The character Gary was renamed Dean Thomas in the final publication. Courtesy of J.K. Rowling.
Rowling has sold drawings at auction in the last few years, which have offered a glimpse of what we can expect from the multi-talented author. The characters resemble their movie counterparts with surprising similarity and echo the author’s evocative language. With a few lines of text on the paper, Rowling reveals what she had in mind for her characters before the book was published.
Original Thomas Taylor cover for the 25th anniversary edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
“I’m often asked if I was paralyzed by the pressure of producing the cover art for the very first edition,” Taylor told the Guardian. “But that is because nowadays it’s hard to imagine a time when no one had heard of Harry Potter at all. I was a newly graduated art student back in 1996 and looking for my first break in illustration.”
J.K. Rowling drew this illustration in a hand-annotated copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone that sold for £150,000 (about $228,000) at Sotheby’s in 2013. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
One sketch by Rowling, which appeared exclusively in the Guardian, shows Rubeus Hagrid, Professor Albus Dumbledore, and Professor Minerva McGonagall huddled together on a moonlit Privet Drive. But much of the book’s contents remain a well-kept secret.
This 25th anniversary edition of the book will be on sale for one year only.