Anything remotely related to "Harry Potter" can fetch a pretty penny these days and that includes the chair J.K. Rowling sat in while writing the first two books of the beloved series. The chair that once sat in Rowling's dining room will go up for auction next month in New York.
Heritage Auctions will start the bid at $45,000 on behalf of an unnamed consignor in Manchester, England. The current owner purchased the chair through an eBay sale in 2009 for $29,117 (£19,555). The chair first went up for auction when Rowling donated it to Chair-ish a Child, a small auction that benefits Great Britain's "National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children."
James Gannon, the director of rare books at Heritage Auctions, predicts the chair will sell for at least $75,000 if not $100,000. The seat will go on display at Heritage's gallery in New York City (445 Park Avenue) beginning in mid-March. The online bidding will start on March 18 and culminate with the live auction on April 6.
Before donating the chair, the "Harry Potter" author refurbished the seat. On the back slats of the chair she wrote, "You may not find me/pretty ~ but don't judge/on what you see." She continued around the wood holding the cushion, "I wrote/Harry Potter/while sitting/on this chair."
The chair also comes typed and signed letter, written by Rowling before the 2002 auction. She relates a short history about the chair and ends with this parting note, "My nostalgic side is quite sad to see it go, but my back isn't."
Rowling drafted the first two installments of the seven-book series, "Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone" (published in the U.S. as "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) and "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets." A first edition copy of "The Philospher's Stone" of which there were only 500 printed by Bloomsbury Children's Books sold for $43,750 in a 2013 Heritage Auction.
"For me, what's important about the chair is that [Rowling] basically created a unique artwork that's self-reflexive. It's all about her creation," Gannon said. "There's not that much in Harry Potter world that's very valuable or very rare because the books were so big so quickly, so after the first couple of books, the first editions were quite large, and I think, by the end, they were printing like 8m or 10m copies of the first edition."
