In December, 2007, Amazon.com purchased one of only seven copies of the book in exsistence. From their site:
The titles of the five tales are:
1. "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot"
2. "The Fountain of Fair Fortune"
3. "The Warlock's Hairy Heart"
4. "Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump"
5. "The Tale of the Three Brothers"
Amazon.com has also posted more pictures plus a short synopsis and review of each story; because there are spoilers included, I won't give more information here. If you're interested in reading the reveiws, be sure to follow the link. (I read them - they're awesome and worth a few minutes to check out!)
http://www.amazon.com/beedlebard ~ Enjoy!
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.
The titles of the five tales are:
1. "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot"
2. "The Fountain of Fair Fortune"
3. "The Warlock's Hairy Heart"
4. "Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump"
5. "The Tale of the Three Brothers"
Amazon.com has also posted more pictures plus a short synopsis and review of each story; because there are spoilers included, I won't give more information here. If you're interested in reading the reveiws, be sure to follow the link. (I read them - they're awesome and worth a few minutes to check out!)
http://www.amazon.com/beedlebard ~ Enjoy!
Your opinion differs from millions of other readers who enjoy the books. That makes you smarter, dumber, or just different. Either way, going to the effort of commenting on a neatorama post and so passionately responding with such a wonderful, if not pretentious, vocabulary shows which one you hope we believe.
Started to read the fourth and got bogged down in the tweeness and plain bad writing.
I read Moby Dick - and finished it - at 16, tvm.
Again, I'm sorry you seem to hate fun, and other people disagreeing with you. Please, continue reading Moby Dick.
As for getting kids to read, yes, big ups to that BUT if that's ALL kids are going to read then we're back in the Land of Suck.
There's a lot more to fostering a desire to read and a love of literature than foisting off second rate recycled pap on impressionable minds - come the day when they are confronted with a work that requires engagement of anything other than a candyfloss mentality (say, Moby Dick or Huckleberry Finn or Dune or War And Peace...), kids raised on predigested baby lit will likely as not throw said book in the too hard basket and never bother trying again.
The issue I have with the Potter series is that they are NOT great literature, not even great books, yet the works of JKR have reached the top of lists of the Greatest Lit. of All Time - voted their by people who'd previously never read anything more complex than a ketchup bottle.