That Potter Story Has Legs

Since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released last Saturday, it’s felt as though editors everywhere have been saying “If it reads, it leads.”

Who can blame them? After a decade of ever-escalating stories about the boy wizard and his Titian-haired creator, reporters are looking at a hole where Harry used to be. Best to fill it while there's still a story to be told.

Though the Harry Potter story certainly has legs, some of the connections being made are... well... more tenuous than others. For example, Pink News UK tells us about the lesbian reading material on a bookcase behind Rowling in one of the author’s bio shots.

A closer examination of the image gives us an insight into Rowling's own reading material. Assuming it's her bookcase of course.

After all, it could be her bookcase. But then again... maybe not.

And while some publications are going for the big reach, others have settled for the blatantly obvious. For example, The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat reports that, while some people hate Harry Potter, some people... um... don’t.

There have always been two critical camps on the Harry Potter phenomenon -- the small band of haters, which includes Harold Bloom, A.S. Byatt, and lesser lights like Ron Charles, and the host of apologists, which includes more or less everybody else. I'm a card-carrying member of the latter group; I’m not a Potter obsessive by any stretch, having read each book only once, but I am a great admirer of Rowling’s work, and I’ve always thought that that her skill as a storyteller and world-builder outweighs her literary weaknesses.

I found Douthat’s Rowling assessment somewhat sour grapsey, but to help you to draw your own conclusions, the piece is here.

The business section of The Times Online skates on thin ice connecting Potter mania to book collecting.

The first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was limited to only 500 copies in hardback and over 1,000 in paperback. As a result, a signed copy of a first-edition hardback (which sold for £10.99 in 1997) notched up a world record of £27,370 at Bloomsbury Auctions in London in May this year.

In fairness, part of the sour grapes over this one might be mine: I owned a first edition Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and did not keep it. I console myself with my signed copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Though The Times brings us to book collecting through the lens of Harry Potter, it widens that lens throughout the piece, bringing us a full, if brief, view of collecting books.

Star examples include Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon from 1930 (more than £35,000), and Agatha Christie’s first Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, from 1921 (more than £20,000) and HG Wells’s The First Men in the Moon from 1901 (£12,000).

Perhaps the ultimate is the first issue of Ulysses by James Joyce from 1922. It was published in various limited states but the rarest was 100 copies on special paper, signed by Joyce. These can now fetch more than £150,000.

The piece ends with some general collecting advice, including, “Go for the first edition of the first book by an author who later becomes popular.” That’s the trick though, isn’t it? And if you have the secret to ferreting out the author who will be popular, there are a lot of agents, editors and publishers who would like to hear from you.

India’s Economic Times goes all literary critic when they ask the unbylined question, “Wanna know the real secret of Potter’s success?” In yet another business-writer-turns-armchair-psychologist attempt at breaking down the Potter phenomenon, the Economic Times lays it all out for us. Simple like, so we don't miss it:

As more individuals experience the product, the benefit to others increases, lifting the incentive to experience the product even more. Woe be unto the poor child who showed up at elementary school in 1999 without a thorough knowledge of wizards and muggles. Such social pressures fired demand, which lured parents into reading the book with their children.

Oh... that’s what is was. And here we thought it was just because a lot of people liked Rowling’s books. Wrong, says Economic Times:

There are many works of art that are equally as entertaining as the Harry Potter books. Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy is as enjoyable, and perhaps more imaginative. But Potter scored the big prize. Why? Clearly, the artistry of Rowling is an important element explaining Potter's success, but the changing economics of the ‘new’ economy clearly plays a role as well.

Of course, the big news since the seventh and final Harry Potter novel was released five days ago has been all about numbers. You’ll have seen some of these stories already: the Harry Potter books are expected to eclipse sales of The Bible. The films will outsell even the mega-hit Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. No one has sold more books in as many places as J.K. Rowling.

I will remember this moment. I think I’ll remember it all my life: this excitement, this hoopla, this loss of perspective and balance. I will remember the week during the summer of 2007 when everything else was pushed from our minds. When, for a heartbeat, we forgot about limits, we adjusted our sights. And we thought about possibilities and about magic and the fictional orphan who touched so many lives.