The first Catalan edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was released in March 1999, just over three months after the first Spanish translation. In April 1998 Ernest Folch, the director of Editorial Empúries visited the Children’s and Youth Book Fair in Bologna (Italy) when he came across the English edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. After reading the book in the hotel Folch made an offer of 100,000 pesetas for the rights to publish the book in Catalan. The offer was accepted and the book was then published the following year in March 1999 in an edition of 1,500 copies across two print runs. The book initially didn’t sell well and they were only able to sell 700-800 copies—making a loss on the money invested. This changed quickly with the success of the series and as of 2016 there had been 400,000 copies of the Catalan translation sold across various editions, including also a new deluxe collectors edition.

The translation was created by Laura Escorihuela Martínez who was studying an Erasmus course in language and interpretation at the time at the University of Lyon. Ernest Folch wanted a young and fresh person to conduct the translation and she translated the book using a French keypad as she was studying in France.

The first edition has become famous among collectors for it’s plain cover with the stock image of a wizard. The cover was designed by Enric Jardí, at the time they didn’t know much about Harry Potter and didn’t foresee how big it was going to become. The design which was used for the cover followed the pattern of a collection published by Editorial Empúries which included both fiction and non-fiction books that had nothing to do with Harry Potter. This is why it has colourful stripes with neutral typography. The image of the wizard was from stock photography and belonged to a series of characters from a brand called PhotoDisc which no longer exists and used to supply CD ROMs. For the later editions of the Catalan translation illustrations were created which more closely resembled the characters.

There are two print runs of the first edition, it’s unknown how many of each were printed but there was a total of 1,500 copies—the first printing appears more common out of the two.