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The original 'Harry Potter' book cover art is expected to break records at auction
Thomas Taylor’s original cover illustration for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997) is expected to break auction records at Sotheby’s on June 26.
Sotheby’s
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Sotheby’s
Thomas Taylor’s original cover illustration for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997) is expected to break auction records at Sotheby’s on June 26.
Sotheby’s
The book cover art that introduced readers across the world to Harry Potter is expected to break auction records next month.
This past week, Sotheby’s announced the auction scheduled for June 26 in New York of Thomas Taylor’s original watercolor illustration for the first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Published by Bloomsbury in 1997, the title kicked off the famous seven-book series.
In a statement shared with NPR, the auction house said the artwork is expected to sell for $400,000 to $600,000 — a record estimate for any Harry Potter-related material ever offered at auction.
With over 500 million copies sold worldwide across 80 languages, the Harry Potter series has become a global phenomenon.
Taylor’s illustration — which depicts the boy magician with his trademark round spectacles and lightning bolt-shaped forehead scar boarding the train to Hogwarts from King’s Cross Station’s platform 9 3/4 — was first offered at auction at Sotheby’s in London in 2001, according to the statement. At that point, there were only four published Harry Potter books, yet Pottermania was already taking hold: the artwork sold for a then-record-breaking 85,750 pounds.
Sotheby’s said it expects the return of the artifact to the auction block to do exponentially better this time around, as the appetite for Potter-related fare has only increased over the past couple of decades with the release of the blockbuster films and various spinoffs. In 2021, an unsigned first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone sold for $421,000 at Heritage Auctions in Dallas — the current record for a Harry Potter-related item.
Richard Austin, Sotheby’s global head of books & manuscripts, said in a statement that Taylor’s work “serves as the visual blueprint for the boy wizard who has since inspired millions worldwide.”
A rookie assignment
This handout from Christie’s shows the cover of J.K. Rowling’s first novel Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone.
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This handout from Christie’s shows the cover of J.K. Rowling’s first novel Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone.
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Illustrator Taylor was a 23-year-old recent art school graduate when he received the commission from Bloomsbury to create a cover illustration for a fantasy children’s book by the then-unknown author J.K. Rowling.
It was the artist’s first professional assignment. According to Taylor, he wasn’t given much in the way of creative license.
“I was actually asked to paint this scene by the editor at Bloomsbury who said, ‘could you please paint Hogwarts at King’s Cross Station and Harry approaching the Hogwarts Express?’ ” said Taylor in a 2022 video interview for the J.K. Rowling online fan community, The Rowling Library. “I was very new and just starting out, so I didn’t feel I could say ‘No, I think it should be something different.’ So I was just doing what I was told, really.”
He read Rowling’s manuscript on the train after that meeting — one of the very first people to do so.
“It was a stack of paper. It was only printed on one side. Chapter 11 wasn’t there, because the author was changing something, so it was missing Chapter 11. And it had a few notes and things in it as well. So it was a very, very early printout,” Taylor told The Rowling Library.
After delivering his painting to the publisher, Taylor said for a few months he used the blank underside of each manuscript page for sketching. “And then I think I put the rest of it in the recycling bin,” he said. “Of course now I really regret that.”
Mixed feelings
Taylor has gone on to become an award-winning children’s book author and illustrator. His titles include the series Eerie-on-Sea. Bloomsbury reissued Philosopher’s Stone as part of its 25th anniversary commemorative reprint of the Harry Potter books in 2022.
But Taylor said he long had mixed feelings about this early, giant success.
“Normally when you start out as an illustrator, you kind of hope that your first work will be a bit forgotten and then you’ll develop and get better and better,” Taylor told The Rowling Library. “But of course, in this case, this first piece of work has sort of followed me my entire career. So I look at it and I think, ‘Why did I paint that? Why didn’t I paint something more exciting?’ “
But he said he’s finally made peace with it — in part because of how prized his Harry Potter book cover painting has become at auction.
“It is quite striking when I see an auction catalog, and then there’s a first edition Charles Dickens, and then Beatrix Potter or something, and then there’s my picture,” he said. “It is fun to see it appear in places like that.”
Indeed, Taylor’s artwork will be go under the hammer in June as part of a sale that includes works by such literary greats as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allan Poe — and a handwritten manuscript by none other than J.K. Rowling.
The Kennedy Center, the facade of which remains covered with a tarp, is seen in Washington, DC, on June 28, 2026. A US federal judge asked on June 24 for an explanation for why a tarpaulin continues to cover the facade of the Kennedy Center where President Donald Trump’s name was recently removed. District Judge Christopher Cooper gave the board of trustees of the performing arts venue until the end of July to explain “the purpose for and status of the tarp and scaffolding that Defendants have erected on the front portico of the Center.”
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More than two weeks ago, President Trump’s name was removed from the Kennedy Center facade though it is still covered by a tarp and the legal battle continues.
On Monday, a U.S. Department of Justice filing on behalf of the Kennedy Center included some surprises. The document was submitted in response to issues raised by lawyers for ex-officio board member Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio who is suing to remove President Trump’s name from the center and stop its closure for renovations.
Among the revelations, the Kennedy Center admitted that, during a board meeting on December 18, 2025, Beatty had been “muted and prevented from speaking.” It was at that meeting that the board voted to add President Trump’s name to the center. The filing later acknowledges the congresswoman was “prevented from voicing her opposition.”
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is a living memorial to its namesake. The guidelines for how the theatre complex spends federal dollars are very specific. Among other rules, it states that “no additional memorials or plaques shall be designated or installed.” Beatty argues adding Trump’s name runs afoul of those rules and that any change requires approval from Congress.
According to one of Beatty’s filings, “There was no advance notice in the agenda that the Board would be considering a name change,” a statement the Kennedy Center now does not deny. The center admits that, prior to voting, there was “no discussion about potential risks or downsides of the vote to adopt a secondary name for the Center.” Nor was there a board discussion “about any potential conflict of interest that might result from the vote.”
The center’s lawyers previously contended that if Trump’s name were to be removed, it would “lose money from donors who support” him and “impede the Center’s fundraising efforts.”
Closing for renovations
Earlier this year, Trump announced on social media that the Kennedy Center would close for two years for renovations. He wrote that he made the decision after “a one year review” with “Contractors, Musical Experts, Art Institutions, and other Advisors and Consultants.”
But, according to the center’s lawyers, Trump’s announcement “was made without presenting any plans, analyses, timelines, or funding information to his cotrustees and without any Board vote.”
The Kennedy Center has long denied reporting by The Washington Post that ticket sales plummeted after President Trump became the Center’s board chair. In Monday’s legal filing, the Center admits that, by October 2025, “nearly half of the Center’s tickets were going unsold.”
Paul Tremblay has made a career of pushing the horror genre – and the novel format – in strange and exciting new directions.
In his latest, Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep, the author offers an amalgamation of genre elements that can be best described as psychological-dystopian-science-fiction horror. It’s a mouthful, but the narrative does all of that and more in a way that defies categorization.
Julia Flang is a former semiprofessional gamer working two mediocre jobs she dislikes and living in a modest ranch house in a San Fernando Valley suburb with her retired uncle, whom she calls Uncle Fun. Julia likes movies and gaming but there’s little else going on in her life, so when her estranged mother, the CFO of a large tech company, contacts her with a possible job offer – a “once-in-a-lifetime thing” that pays handsomely just for doing the interview – she hesitantly agrees.
The job is relatively simple and perfect for someone with gaming skills: using a controller built into a phone to get a man, who is stuck in a vegetative state, from California to the East Coast. It will require her to learn how to control his body – walking, moving, sitting, standing, using his arms – so she can maneuver him out of the facility where he is located and into cars and planes and through crowded airports. A fan of movies, Julia decides to call the man Bernie – after the movie Weekend at Bernie’s. When the ethics of the job start to bother her, Julia realizes it’s too late and she must go through with it. However, she’s soon contacted by people interested in sabotaging the whole thing, people who, like her, don’t align with the shady interests of conglomerates and those set to make “gobs of money” from this new, somewhat inhuman technology.
As with every Tremblay novel, any synopsis barely scratches the surface. The novel’s chapters alternate between Julia and you (yes, you). Julia’s chapters are “normal” in the sense that they obey a chronological order and have action, basic descriptions of movement and places, and dialogue. The chapters in second person are like fever dreams from a shadow world; the desperate experiences of a man trapped inside his own body with no control of it, no clue what’s happening to him, and only a few fragmented memories of his life. Also, Tremblay uses a similarly fragmented style of storytelling (including words and sentences trapped in boxes and/or “moving” on the page) to keep things interesting but also confusing and creepy.
This novel operates on several different levels and – planes of existence? Bernie has a head full of AI that controls his body, but his consciousness is still there and struggling to regain control, struggling to remember things. There are monsters, leeches, mysterious rabbits, and eerie shadows in his world, but the true horror comes from the lack of control, from being moved around against his will and having no clue what comes next. Bernie is the embodiment of losing control to AI, and when taken together with the commentary of creativity and AI and the meta interludes in which the author takes a wrecking ball to the fourth wall and addresses readers, this is the best anti-Generative AI story horror has produced so far.
Despite the horror of it, this is a very funny novel. Julia is sarcastic and struggles to keep her comebacks in line, but the conversations she has and messages she writes are always entertaining. However, the humor is far from the crown jewel here. That title belongs to a plethora of big ideas Tremblay juggles. The nature of life, death, and consciousness, the evils of conglomerates, inhuman practices in the name of capitalism, and AI, and even what it means to be human are all explored here: “Is Bernie alive? Is he feeling pain? Is he experiencing everything as a prisoner looking through the bars of his body? Has his consciousness been winnowed to a metaphysical keyhole? Where does consciousness begin or end?” There are no definite answers here, but the way Tremblay infuses humanity, love, the importance of relationships, and humor throughout the narrative provides the kind of answers that can’t and don’t need to be spelled out.
A genre-bender full of big ideas that constantly switches between a world full of real or uncomfortably plausible nightmares and a bizarre hellscape in which loss of self, memory, and autonomy are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep is a horrific and terrifyingly disorienting novel that invites readers to consider a future that already started. Tremblay has always been an innovator, but this beautifully written collection of real and imagined grotesqueries cements him not only as one of the most original and exciting voices in horror but also as one of the smartest, most engaging authors in contemporary fiction.
Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @Gabino_Iglesias.
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