Wizardry: Rare J.K. Rowling Book Sold For $4 Mil

Amazon.com flexed their check-writing muscle recently buy purchasing one of seven handmade copies of J.K. Rowling's compilation of fairy tales, The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Here's a little bit from Amazon's bragging page.

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.

If you take a look at the pictures of the actual book, the cover and illustration designs look pretty morbid, so who knows what the pages hold.