Rare Harry Potter book fetches $19,000 at auction

We've left the muggle world without Harry Potter news for far too long. Lest our readership leave us for wizard sources like The Daily Prophet, we dug around like Rita Skeeter (more ethically, of course) and came up with some juicy new Potter tidbits.

A first edition Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was sold at an auction in Dallas, Texas recently for a whopping $19,120. The soft-cover book was one of the first 200 printed and published in the United States, and was signed by J.K. Rowling. The auction house staff estimated that the book would go for $12,000, but apparently they misjudged how far Potter fanatics are willing to go for a potion fix.

Honestly, they should have know better. Last year, an 800-word prequel to the series was sold to a writers' group and dyslexia charity for $50,000. The prequel was also hand-signed by Rowling.

Other than that, we hope Potter-fans have been well-employed with Rowling's The Tales of Beetle the Bard, released last December, since the sneakily-titled Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors didn't exactly fill the Hogwarts void. But since many fans can blaze through a Rowling tale in a matter of days, they're are most likely drumming their fingers, waiting for the summer adaption of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Luckily for them, the Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows movie will be split into two parts, so it'll still be at least three years until complete wizard-withdrawal sets in.

And if the sale of this book says anything, it will likely be much longer.