And there may be too much of the station visible.” I would put him in something different now.

“Harry was about to get on the train at King’s Cross, so I felt he should just be in any old clothes. “I would do it completely differently now,” he said. The 25th anniversary edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is out next month Photograph: Thomas Taylor/ Bloomsbury “I thought all the old imagery would be replaced for good by film stills,” he said. Taylor’s father died in 2020, and the original sketch was sold at auction after the films came out. You expect your first job to be completely forgotten.” I wasn’t planning for it to become a huge thing that would follow me through my life, though. “It might be the sort of thing he would need. “I thought it might well be a hedgehog,” he said. Speaking to the Observer, Taylor also resolved another prickly question that has stumped fans – what made the odd shape in the wizard’s deep coat pocket. “Conspiracy theories began to grow, and the trickle of letters and emails to Bloomsbury became a torrent, until I was eventually asked to replace my father with a painting of Albus Dumbledore.” “Was there some secret here? Was this a clue to something that would happen in later books? And what was that in the mysterious wizard’s coat pocket?” The questions kept coming, recalls Taylor.

The pressure to solve the puzzle quickly became intense, with fans suggesting rival interpretations. ‘It’s not Dumbledore, it’s not Quirrell and it’s not Snape’,” he writes. Stumped for speedy inspiration, he writes, he drew a study of his own “magical” father, Robert, dressed in a pointy hat and smoking a large pipe. When Taylor was commissioned at the age of 23, he was asked to provide an extra image of a wizard for the back cover. The new hardback will be on sale for a year, and includes an explanation of a mystery that has long baffled the most devoted readers. Twenty-five years on, and Taylor’s cover has become one of the most recognisable images in world literature. It had seemed like a good warm-up job for an aspiring young illustrator: create some artwork for a new children’s book about a schoolboy wizard.

I was a newly graduated art student back in 1996, and looking for my first break in illustration.” “But that is because nowadays it’s hard to imagine a time when no one had heard of Harry Potter at all. “I’m often asked if I was paralysed by the pressure of producing the cover art for the very first edition,” Taylor, 48, says. Thomas Taylor’s back cover for the first edition: the mysterious wizard, based on his father (and later replaced by an image of Dumbledore) does indeed have a hedgehog in his pocket, Taylor confirms.

25th anniversary of harry potter