Soaring Away With Harry Potter

So you thought the days of daydreaming about flying a broomstick to magical worlds were long gone?

Think again. Since J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was released in August 1998, thousands of young--and old--Americans have reentered a magical world via Harry Potter.

The Scottish Rowling has now written three books, The Chamber of Secrets and The Prisoner of Azkaban in addition to her first, which are currently the top three books on The New York Times Bestseller List. The Sorcerer's Stone has been on that list for the past 50 weeks.

That's no small feat, considering that Charlotte's Web in 1952 was the last book in this age group to do the same, according to one children's book specialist.

And Harry Potter is inspiring almost as much loyalty as E. B. White's lovable spider has.

Harry Potter is a small, bespectacled British boy with a charming rags-to riches-story.

After growing up in suburban London, Harry discovers he is a wizard, and is whisked away from his evil relatives to study at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Although it seems like a standard children's story line, the books have created a worldwide sensation.

Helen Springut '03 happened upon Harry Potter on her little brother's bookshelf and was hooked.

"It's entertaining for children. It's entertaining for adults, too," she says.

"I had a man with a three-piece suit just coming in because he said he had

to find out what all the talk was about," says Leland Ringen, who has worked in the Harvard Coop's children's book section for more than a decade.

Though the books are intended for children ages 9 to 11, even college students have been sacrificing valuable sleep to turn pages late into the night.

"It's a very suspenseful genre," says Nissara Horayangura '00, who first heard of the books when she was living in London this past summer.

"There was this huge uproar about the series. I decided I wanted to check it out," Horayangura says. "I started reading the first one, and I was like, 'Oh my God. This is really good!'"

A British Flavor

Readers rave about the books' imaginative touches, which have been compared to C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl. Rowling took real life situations--like going away to school--and painted a world of magic around them.

Like Lewis and Dahl, the books have a distinctly British flavor to them. Rowling gets away with plot devices that would have a hard time making it by an American publisher, according to The Coop's Ringen.

"Unlike a lot of American books, it doens't pull a lot of punches," Ringen says.

When the book begins, Harry is living in a cupboard under the staircase in his aunt and uncle's house. His parents died when he was an infant, and his relatives treat him as a nuisance.

"If you tried to start a book out like that in America, a lot of people wouldn't be too happy," Ringen says.

Still, Harry's magical world is popular with both British and American readers.

Among the fantastic elements:

To enter his dormitory at school, Harry needs to say a password which opens a painting to reveal a secret passageway.

Letters from home arrive at school by post--owl post, that is, flying into the Great Hall every morning.

Classes include "Potions," "Defense Against the Dark Arts" and "Transfiguration." The Transfiguation teacher is renowned for her ability to turn herself into a cat.

The books offer something for readers of all ages. Younger readers can envision themselves in Harry's shoes as he explores the new world with his school friends; young adult readers can search for allusions to real moral struggles, and older readers can relive their days of pre-adolescent desire to escape to a land of magic and wonder.

"It appeals to a wide range of people, and can link people together," Horayangura says.

Rowling's Magical Journey

If Harry is "a reluctant hero," as Ringen describes him, his author is much the same.

J.K. Rowling has shot from obscurity to fame since the first book's 1997 release in the United Kingdom.

Her narrative in some ways mirrors her own life, according to the Scholastic Books Web site. Back when she started writing the books, Rowling was a divorced mother going through a difficult period. She wrote the first book in a coffee shop where she could bring her young daughter.

This book--titled Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in Britain--was funded in part with a grant from the Scottish Arts Council. Rowling has since won the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year and the Smarties Prize.

The Harry Potter books have now been published everywhere from Portugal to Japan, and the fourth book will be released in summer 2000.

There will be seven books total, one for each grade Harry goes through at Hogwarts.

According to Ringen, the Harry Potter fever has been instructive for publishers about trends in the modern marketplace.

Rowling's third book was released in Britain last July. The U.S. version did not reach stores until September.

Between the two release dates, American readers hungry to find out what was happening at Hogwarts ordered the British version over the Internet, from amazon.co.uk.

"A lot of people were going to the Internet.It shows us how people get things," says Ringen, who adds that Scholastic has coordinated future Harry Potter release dates with British publisher Bloomsbury.

Amazon.com has a 50 percent discount on the three Harry Potter books, which hover at the top of its "100 Hot Books" list. Barnes and Noble has deducted 30 percent from the cover price, which is the store's policy for books on The New York Times bestseller list.

Despite competition on-line, the Harvard Coop has seen Harry Potter fly off the shelves.

Since it was released on Oct. 5, the Barnes and Noble branch has sold 339 copies of The Sorcerer's Stone in paperback. 284 copies of the hardcover Prisoner of Azkaban sold in the same period.

"The fever has definitely caught on," says Steve Babbitt, the Coop's trade book manager. "She's been pretty popular all over the place."

Studying Divination

Much like Harry, fans are now concentrating on predicting the plot of Rowling's next book.

In his third year at Hogwarts, Harry and his two best friends--Ron and Hermione--take up the study of divination. The class teaches them to read tea leaves, palms and crystal balls.

Fans and interviewers only wish they had the same skill.

As a guest on talk shows, the author has been hounded about what's been happening in Harry's world.

The rumor, which Rowling has refused to deny, is that one of the main characters will die in the next book.

A touch of evil already lurks in Harry's world. A wizard who took up the Dark Arts killed his parents, but could not kill Harry, who was left with a lightning bolt scar on his forehead. This mark makes him instantly recognizeable in the wizard world.

The wizard, Voldemort, is still out there and after young Harry.

"Just so the villain is not a hollow villain he's going to have to kill

someone," Ringen says. "He's just too mean. People are trying to figure out who's going to die."

On newsgroups, readers are posting thoughts about the outcome.

The anticipation is a tribute to the world Rowling has constructed for her readers to disappear into.

"It's been a while since a book came out that didn't state an idea, that

was just fun," Ringen says.