Fairy-tale finish for star author

Source: Agencies  |   2008-8-1  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

A book of fairy tales written and illustrated by Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling is to be published for charity.

A British charity said yesterday it hoped to raise 4 million pounds (US$8 million) through sales of "The Tales of Beedle the Bard."

She has described the book as a distillation of the themes found in the Harry Potter books, calling it her "goodbye to the theme." Rowling co-founded The Children's High Level Group charity, which supports institutionalized children.

The book is a collection of five wizarding tales referred to in Rowling's Potter saga. It was initially produced in an edition of seven handwritten copies. Six were given away by Rowling as gifts, and one was bought by retailer Amazon at an auction in December for almost 2 million pounds.

Rowling said the new edition would include her illustrations and introduction, the stories themselves and commentaries ostensibly by Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of the fictional Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, "which appear by generous permission of the Hogwarts Headmasters' Archive."

The book will be published on December 4 by Bloomsbury in Britain and Scholastic in the United States. Amazon also plans a leather-bound collectors' edition priced at 50 pounds.

Rowling, whose Harry Potter books have sold more than 400 million copies and been translated into 64 languages, wrote the Beedle tales after finishing "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the seventh and final work in the series last year.