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'He'll be famous — a legend — I wouldn't be surprised if today were known as Harry Potter day in the future — there will be books written about Harry — every child in our world will know his name!'
— Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997) by J.K. Rowling
And lo, it came to pass. The story of how the magical baby Harry escaped certain death, and saved his people from the evil Voldemort, spread through the nations. And Harry Potter was idolized by millions from Beijing to Brandon. And every child in our world knew his name.
Sasha Tate-Howarth, 15, right, with her friends Robin Blue 12, left and Shifra Cooper 16, centre, are shown reading letters they and others have written as part of The Phoenix Quill project, a Harry Potter prequel of their own invention. (Wayne Hiebert /The Globe and Mail)
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And then, of course, the critics began to carp. The great Harold Bloom decided this wasn't great literature. Christian fundamentalists had to have it explained to them that good always triumphs over evil in a Harry Potter book. Marxist theorists subjected Hogwarts to class analysis. Feminists pointed out that Hermione is a drip. Is it possible, just possible, scholars began to wonder, that kids know Harry's name only because their white, middle-class parents have seized on these nostalgic books to quiet their fears about juvenile illiteracy, cultural diversity and creeping technology?
When first-time author Joanne Rowling produced Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1997, the book about a young wizard at a magical boarding school was an instant success in her native Britain, and was soon imported into Canada. It was published in the United States the following year; the series, now translated into 65 languages, was soon selling tens of millions of copies as readers seized on the next three Harry Potters that appeared annually.
In the new millennium, the combination of a three-year wait for book five ( Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, published in 2003) and the release of a Hollywood version of the first book in 2001 launched Harry into the stratosphere. With sales outstripping all other contemporary titles, the series began to change the publishing industry, blurring the line between adult and children's fiction. In 2000, The New York Times created a second bestseller list for children's literature because it believed the Potter books were distorting its adult list. In Canada, the series turned tiny Raincoast Books of Vancouver into a Harry Potter marketing machine.
It was in these years that the now-familiar Pavlovian pattern of Harrymania also took hold: Lineups of readers wait outside bookstores on publication day for the release of the newest title at the stroke of midnight; the media breathlessly report on the publishers' elaborate security precautions and the excitement among "the Muggles."
That's the pattern that will be repeated two weeks from today, when the seventh and final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is released at midnight Greenwich Mean Time in London, and then at 12 a.m. in each of North America's time zones. Fans will be discussing the book online by morning — although the last four books are all over 600 pages, children as young as 8 are reported to devour them in a matter of days, if not hours.
And with the film of book five already in theatres by then (it opens Wednesday), this will be another summer of inescapable Potter worship. Nor is there any sign, with two more films to go, and potential new readers arriving in maternity wards every second, that the publication of the final book is going to end the phenomenon.
It's not hard to see why the Harry Potter books are popular. They're fast-paced and humorous, with page-turning plots that are essentially teen-detective stories.
And in an era when parents worry about boys' literacy, and the entertainment industry believes boys won't accept female protagonists, the male hero draws in readers of both sexes. The books have also increasingly crossed over into the adult market, where they are sold with darker, photographic covers, partly because young adults now read them as fantasy titles, and partly because Rowling has held on to her readers as they grow up — only slightly faster than Harry, who has aged seven years in a decade.
