Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

ROWLING, J.K.

Item Number: 138397

New York: Arthur A. Levine Books: An Imprint of Scholastic Press, 1999.

First American edition of the second book in Rowling’s best-selling Harry Potter series. Octavo, original half cloth, illustrated by Mary Grandpré. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket art by Mary Grandpré. Jacket design by Mary Grandpré and David Saylor.

The second novel in Rowling's acclaimed Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets follows Harry's second year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, when a series of cryptic messages appear on the walls of the schools corridors warning that the heir of Slytherin has arrived to kill all pupils who are not descended from entirely magical families. When the book was published in 1998, “...Bloomsbury was a little less cautious” than they had been upon publishing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone the previous year, “but the first printing was still minuscule, considering the demand. Estimates range between 1000 and 2000 copies… They have been notably scarce” (Smiley, 52). The film adaptation of the novel, released in 2002 and starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson became the fifth highest-grossing film to date at that time.