Footnotes

A FINE COPY OF THE FIRST HARDBACK PRINTING OF THE FIRST HARRY POTTER NOVEL, GIVEN BY CHRISTOPHER LITTLE TO THE AUTHOR WHO HAD HELPED LAUNCH HIS CAREER AS A LITERARY AGENT - A TACIT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF A FRIENDSHIP WHICH ULTIMATELY LED TO LITTLE'S DISCOVERY OF J.K. ROWLING.

Provenance: Presented by Christopher Little to the author Philip Nicholson (1940-2005), better known as A.J. Quinnell; sold on behalf of Nicholson's last wife, Elsebeth Egholm Nicholson, Danish journalist and author of crime fiction novels, including the Dicte stories on which the television series was based.

After working all over the world for many years, the Yorkshire-born Christopher Little had come to London in 1974. Finding the employment world very challenging, he decided to open his own recruitment agency. According to a newspaper article in 2007, Little's "switch to the literary world happened by accident in 1979. A schoolfriend and fellow Hong Kong trader, Philip Nicholson, had written a thriller and was seeking representation. Little agreed to take him on and the book, Man on Fire, was published under the pseudonym AJ Quinnell. It went on to sell 7.5 million copies worldwide and become a Hollywood film..." (David Smith, The Guardian, 15 July 2007).

The Christopher Little Literary Agency gradually grew alongside the recruitment business, and had some twenty authors on its books in 1992 when the recruitment arm was sold. "In his only press interview, in 2003, Little recalled: 'The literary agency was really a hobby which started through an accident. I was helping an old friend in his writing career. I had been running as a full-time business for about six years when Harry Potter arrived'" (David Smith, op cit).

And so it was that in 1995 Little received in the post three chapters of a manuscript from an unknown author named Joanne Rowling, who had apparently chosen the agency at random because the name sounded like a character in a children's story. And the rest, as we know, is publishing history.

Meanwhile Little and Nicholson remained firm friends until the latter's death in 2005, and Little would remain close friends with Elsebeth Egholm until his own death in 2021.