Rowling's writing chair to be auctioned

A chair J.K. Rowling used to write the first two volumes of her best-selling Harry Potter series is set to sell at an auction in New York on Wednesday.

Pre-auction bidding via the Internet had reached $65,000 on Monday for the modest 1930s-era oak chair on which Rowling, 50, sat while writing Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, published in Britain in 1997, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998), the first two of seven volumes.

Rowling received the chair - one of a mismatched set of four - free when she was a young single mother living in subsidized housing in the Scottish city of Edinburgh.