More magic on the way from J.K. Rowling

NEW YORK: The “Harry Potter” author is launching a series called “Magic in North America,” a four-part backstory for this fall’s film adaptation of the Potter prequel “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.”
Announced Monday on J.K. Rowling’s Web site, www.pottermore.com, “Magic in North America” will run in installments Tuesday-Friday on Pottermore.
According to the Web site, the new series will tell of the North American wizardry school Ilvermorny and “bring to light the history of this previously unexplored corner of the wizarding world in the run up to ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.’“
Rowling has taken on numerous projects lately, from the stage production “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” to her detective novels written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
Meanwhile, the humble chair Rowling sat on while writing the first two books of the Harry Potter series is going on the auction block in New York City on April 6 with an opening bid of $45,000.
It’s an ordinary-looking chair but magical in that Rowling placed “this unassuming 1930s-era oak chair with a replacement burlap seat decorated with a red thistle ... in front of her typewriter and went about writing two of the most important books of the modern era,” said James Gannon, director of rare books at Heritage Auctions.
It was one of four mismatched chairs given to the then starving artist for her flat in Edinburgh, Scotland, and which she used while writing “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.”