Christie's auction house in London is offering for sale a copy of the first edition of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", which is the first book in the fiction series, with typographical errors and signed by British writer J.K. Rowling, at a price starting from 250 thousand dollars.
This edition is one of 500 copies of the book's first edition in 1997, of which 300 were sent to bookstores, and is one of the few remaining copies of the first edition, numbering 200, and Christie's will be up for sale at its next auction during a literary exhibition.
"There were a few things they seemed to have gone wrong in producing this book," Mark Wiltshire, a print specialist and co-curator of the exhibition, told Reuters.
He added, "On the back cover, for example, the word philosophers... had a typo" as well as another phrase repeated "on page 53".
A relatively obscure writer writing in an Edinburgh café, Rowling is now a millionaire and the world's highest-paid author. This book about the wizarding world has been a huge success around the world, and is based on the philosopher's stone hidden in the school under the watch of teachers.
"In many ways, this book is a physical embodiment of a memory of magic for many, which is what makes it so desirable," Wiltshire said.
Fantasy and its magic
Fantasy writing has charm, luster, and attraction around the world, attracting a huge fan base of readers despite the lack of realism, or perhaps that's why readers like to escape from their reality just by reading and without a time travel portal or spacecraft.
Other than being an escape from reality, fantasy literature opens the door to magical or miraculous solutions that allow escaping miserable lives and bypassing logical reasons.
However, fantasy literature revolves around humans and humans, and deals with tragedy, pain, sacrifice, bonds, feelings and romance, and therefore it is also close to human life despite the distance between reality and imagination.
As many young readers and even children accept to read fantasy literature, they feed their sense of wonder, and today’s children are more in need of this feeling of magic as a response to the huge technological and digital leaps that have explained much of what was previously difficult to explain or “disenchanted the world” as the sociologist quotes German Max Weber on his compatriot poet Friedrich Schiller, referring to the nature of the modern society, "secular" and "rational".
Literary fiction offers children the opportunity to safely explore the large, vast and sometimes dangerous world, and develops the human mind in its early years to bridge the gaps between knowledge, reality and experience. Nevertheless, researchers warn of the dangers of excessive consumption of fantasy.
Fantasy prevails over reality
The French researcher Jean-Marie tried to investigate the causes of passion for the Harry Potter series, so he wrote for the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur, analyzing the hidden reasons why people believe in fairy tales and are attracted to them by a strong attraction that may sometimes forget the connection to real life.
The writer - who is also director of studies at the Higher School of Social Studies - says that this passion for Harry Potter reminds him of what it was like in the days of the Greek philosopher Plato, when the writers of that era, such as Myskelos, Sphoclessen and Aristophanes, fascinated audiences with their plays and fairy tales.
He explained this excessive attachment to the cinematic scenes with the attachment of man since ancient times to fantasy stories, indicating that it reflects an innate human tendency to imagination and escaping from the truth, but at the same time he emphasized that the society in which imagination occupies the place of the mind lives in a dangerous state.
The writer believed that presenting these fairy tales to the viewer in a way that makes him believe that it is true is precisely the place of danger, noting that we are accustomed to believing in fairy tales since childhood, so that when we watch a movie, we may forget that we remember dinner time, just like some people are addicted to video games and diving in worlds. The virtual is away from the realm of reality, which is replaced by ghosts in the form of pictures on the screen or on the pages of a book that tells a fictional story.
The Harry Potter series novels have sold tens of millions of copies around the world and have been translated into many languages (Reuters)
He also says that this naive tendency to believe in fairy tales sticks to the person since childhood, and it stems - according to Plato and the writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau - from the tales of grandmothers for their young children.
Today, according to the researcher, cinema and television have replaced grandmothers and made our children inclined to imagination, which has made them lose their connection to reality and reality.
However, this alone is not sufficient to explain children's attachment to imagination, if it is not accompanied by an innate willingness to accept fictional stories, which may enable the aspect of imagination to dominate human life so that it becomes difficult for him to distinguish between what is real and what is just a mirage.
Plato - by expelling imitators from the utopia - points to the need to stay away from imitation and simulation to avoid falling into this imagination, and Rousseau advises - through Emile (his character he created and deposited his ideas) - to stay away from books and everything that would encourage imagination in children.
The writer says that belief in imagination is due to the fact that it is a set of formations and representations that are a machine for the production of beliefs, especially since the realization of something is a branch of its perception, and from here the person tends to automatically transform the things he is told about into a belief.