The Invisible Library

Now here’s a Christmas present any Harry Potter fan would love to receive:

We’re incredibly excited to announce that Amazon has purchased J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard at an auction held by Sotheby’s in London. The book of five wizarding fairy tales, referenced in the last book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is one of only seven handmade copies in existence. The purchase price was £1,950,000, and Ms. Rowling is donating the proceeds to The Children’s Voice campaign, a charity she co-founded to help improve the lives of institutionalized children across Europe.The Tales of Beedle the Bard is extensively illustrated and handwritten by the bard herself–all 157 pages of it. It’s bound in brown Moroccan leather and embellished with five hand-chased hallmarked sterling silver ornaments and mounted moonstones.

Enjoy these first images of the book. We’ll be adding reviews of each of the fairy tales and more photos of this beautiful object as we can get them up in the coming hours (if you want to be sure of a link that will permanently work, use www.amazon.com/beedlebard). For the curious of mind, Amazon editors are now taking questions about the tales from all comers on our discussion boards (located further down this page).

So, when do the facsimile editions go on sale?

A common feature in the Lovecraftian horror sub-genre is the idea that there is some class of knowledge that Man Was Not Meant to Know. This usually involved some mind bending aspect of the cosmos that turns our psyche inside out if we were to perceive it, or a race of semi-tangible aliens who resemble pineapples with bat wings that turn out to have genetically engineered us as at some distant point in the past because they liked the taste of our brains. This information is invariably located in a book with a tongue twister for a name kept handily on the shelf at Miskatonic University’s Library, albeit in the closed stacks, though pretty much anyone could get it if they just asked for it. A recent poll by the Pew Research Group confirms that a surprisingly large number of people actually think there are books that contain Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, and that they are in our school libraries:

Since 1999, support for the idea of banning “books with dangerous ideas” from public school libraries has declined from 55% to 46% and has now fallen to the lowest level of support of the past 20 years, in contrast with the modest increase observed in concerns about pornographic material in magazines and movies.

The fact that the number of people who would ban books form libraries has fallen to 46% is bothersome.

Hat tip to Emily at Library Revolution.

If our library had a book bound in human skin, it would be the best Library, ever!