Harry Potter and the £20k seat of earning

A SECOND-HAND dining chair may not appear the wisest of investments unless, of course, the previous owner was JK Rowling. The chair on which the author sat while writing the first two Harry Potter novels has been re-sold for £20,000.

The value of Harry Potter memorabilia is weathering the turbulent financial markets well, as the chair was previously sold for £15,000, increasing in value by a third in seven years.

What was once merely the most comfortable of a second-hand set, given to the author when she was an unemployed single mother living in an Edinburgh council flat, has been transformed into an elaborately decorated piece of literary memorabilia.

For since sitting at the chair to write her first two novels – Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – Rowling went on to decorate it with several painted slogans including the words: "I wrote Harry Potter while sitting on this chair."

She originally donated it to a charity auction, called Chair-ish a Child, which was held in aid of the NSPCC in 2002 when it was sold for £15,000.

However, it was recently put up for auction on eBay by its previous owner with 20 per cent of the proceeds going to the charity Books Abroad, which sends free school books to impoverished countries.

Matthew Ford, the art dealer organising the sale, said: "It's a chair you would pay a tenner for in a junk shop but, historically, it's the most important chair in Muggledom, and probably one of the most exceptional and rare pieces of Harry Potter memorabilia ever likely to be offered for sale."

Offers for the chair started at just a penny but a bidding frenzy in the last few minutes saw it sell for £19,555.

Proving its authenticity, the chair comes complete with a special Owl Mail signed by Rowling and addressed to the "new owner of my chair".

The letter explains that she was given four mismatched dining room chairs in 1995 and, because it was the most comfortable, it was this one that ended up at her desk in front of her typewriter.

The author finishes the letter with the comment: "My nostalgic side is sad to see you go but my back isn't."

In the early days as a struggling writer, the author also wrote in Nicholson's Cafe in Edinburgh, which has since closed.

However, the saga she started on an simple wooden chair in a council flat was finished in considerable style.

When working on the final pages of her last Harry Potter novel, The Deathly Hallows, Rowling checked into a luxury suite at the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh where the elaborately padded chairs were considerably more comfortable.

Yet despite the sum paid for her former dining chair, the author has some way to go before beating Charles Dickens, for the desk and chair he used writing Great Expectations. They sold at auction for £430,000 in 2008.

CRAZY FOR ALL THINGS ROWLING

• THE original handwritten manuscript of JK Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard sold at auction for £2 million in 2007. It had been expected to sell for around £50,000, but Amazon.com set a new record for the sale of a modern literary manuscript. The money was donated to The Children's Voice charity.

• Drawings and letters given by Rowling to a family friend in the mid-1990s were put up for sale on eBay for £5,000 after being sold to an Oxford bookshop. The material included a signed sketch, a jocular list of possible baby names and a hand-drawn invitation to her daughter's third birthday party.

• In August 2005, an American bought a first edition, first printing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone through AbeBooks.com from a rare book dealer in Europe. He paid £20,000.

• In 2004, along with 103 other celebrities, Rowling donated a pair of her shoes to YWCA Scotland to be auctioned on eBay. Each pair of shoes represented a victim of domestic abuse in the average annual death toll.