Man Jailed Over Theft of First Edition Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Harry Potter and the Philosophers / Sorcerers StoneJune 06, 2011, 02:15 PM
BBC News today reports the sentencing of Kevin McGirr, a 40-year-old man who pleaded guilty to charges of stealing a rare first edition copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. McGirr took the book--worth approximately £6,000 or about $9,800 US--from the Creative Art Gallery in Woodstock, Oxfordshire back in October. The book was found "wrapped in a plastic bag outside a Boots store in Abingdon on 15 November".
Ordered at Banbury Magistrates' Court to pay both £250 compensation and £400 in legal costs, Kevin McGirr has been jailed for six weeks. Read the full article at this link on the BBC News website.
kyrstalkris, it may be, as Madgerock suggests, one of the small first printing. (Bloomsbury didn’t realise quite how popular it was going to be!) I think there may have been some corrections, too, when they re-printed. You can tell when you’ve got the first edition of a book from information on the left hand page at the start – the sequences of numbers etc. There are websites that explain about this stuff. Some people get very excited about it! Possibly more excited than by actually reading the books!