Tales of Beedle the Bard

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here to inform you that I have purchased the Collector's Edition and Standard Edition of Tales of Beedle the Bard by JK Rowling.

For those that can't recall information I've blogged about over 7 months ago, you will recall that JK Rowling handwrote and illustrated 7 of the leather bound editions of Tales of Beedle the Bard. Six of those editions (every intro was different and every gemstone in each edition were different colors) were given away to people who were closest to the whole process of Harry Potter through the years as "Thank Yous." The 7th (or "moonstone") one was auctioned off in December 2007 through Sotheby's. Amazon.com bought the book at an amazing £1,950,000 (double that number and you get the approx USD value). The proceeds went to her charity, The Children's Voice.

Now, Amazon.com was fair and reviewed each of the stories and set-up a contest where the winner and another person were flown to the UK and the winner got to actually sit in a room and HOLD the book and READ the stories. No one, other than the 6 people and whomever they shared it with, had read the stories. So, you can imagine how the entire fandom was dying to know what the stories were. There were photos taken of the moonstone edition (click here and scroll down past the reviews and there are the photos) and whatnot, but I had no hopes in ever reading the stories. I was bummed, but I wasn't overly bummed because the story that was important we read about in Deathly Hallows and the rest were just for fun.

Anyway, today (or I guess yesterday - Thursday) it was announced that the book was going to be published and all net proceeds would go to The Children's Voice (Amazon.com and the people who own the other 6 books gave it an okay to do). I was SO excited! Then I found out they have a Collector's Edition and, well, I couldn't pass it up. Rumor has it there will only be 100,000 editions made and they're exclusive to Amazon.com (makes sense). If you look at the pictures, it's going to be REALLY cool. It's as close to a replica as you can get. The standard edition is for my reading pleasure. LoL