Artistic Science

facts-i-just-made-up:

J.K. Rowling wrote the first chapter of what would become Harry Potter on the wall of her room in a cupboard under the stairs while she was locked away there by her foster parents.

Unable to return to the house as an adult while developing the novel series, several elements she wrote originally as a child were forgotten, including a mouse friend that Harry named Thistle, the description of numerous bruises on Harry’s head from the stairs above, and a subplot in which Hagrid kept building mechanical trinkets that would have revolutionized the muggle world but were always thrown away as they were uninteresting to wizards.

This photo was taken in 2009 just before the house was torn down, and is all that remains of what is technically the first manuscript of the series. Efforts were to have been undertaken to preserve the historically important wall, but in the end Rowling was unwilling to spend the near $200 it would have taken to do so, stating that “money didn’t grow on trees”.

(via windowless-van)