Books: Wild About Harry Potter

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But this arrangement will change almost immediately because the story keeps on developing. Last Wednesday Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic Press; 435 pages; $19.95) finally went on sale in the U.S., exactly two months after its publication in Britain. Those U.S. readers who had not managed to obtain a copy of the British edition, chiefly through Internet orders, swamped bookstores nationwide. From El Centro, Calif., to Littleton, N.H., many stores opened for business at 12 a.m.; others offered customers tea and crumpets or steep initial discounts. Barbara Babbit Kaufman, president and founder of the Chapter 11 bookstore chain in Atlanta, reports selling more Harry Potter books in the first three hours of business than Tom Wolfe's novel A Man in Full, sold during its first day of availability last November. "Tom Wolfe's was set in Atlanta," she says, "so it was the hottest book we'd ever had." Until, that is, the new Harry Potter hit the shelves.

Not everyone welcomed the prospect of a third best-selling Rowling novel in the U.S. Says David Rosenthal, publisher of Simon & Schuster: "There is a big controversy stirring over whether Harry Potter should be on the New York Times bestseller list. There are a number of publishers--I don't happen to be among them, actually, but I've got calls about this--who are thinking about banding together to beg the New York Times not to include the Harry Potter books on the regular fiction best-selling list, since they now take up two slots and will soon take up a third."

The argument that a list of regular best sellers should exclude children's best sellers will strike most people as preposterous. But then the whole Harry Potter hubbub seems equally outlandish--the proliferating pages that fans are posting almost daily on the Web, the word-of-mouth testimonials from parents marveling that their nonreading children (even boys!) are tearing through the Potter books and begging for more, the confessions of a growing number of adults not so young that they find these young-adult books irresistible. And the arrival of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban will only add more fuel to the Potter conflagration and prompt anew the question that is baffling many non-Harry publishers and readers alike: What on earth is going on here?

If there were an easy answer, nearly every other writer on earth would by now be beavering away at imitations of Rowling's formula for success, and the world would be teeming with best sellers about prepubescent wizards attending bizarre boarding schools somewhere in the north of Britain. And, in fact, it is not particularly hard to figure out the rules governing the Harry Potter books. Place appealing characters in interesting but perilous situations and leave the outcome in doubt for as long as possible. Nothing new here, nothing that storytellers as far back as Homer did not grasp and gainfully employ. But, as devoted Harry Potter fans have learned, knowing a magic charm is not the same thing as performing magic. Rowling's secret is as simple and mysterious as her uncanny ability to nourish the human hunger for enchantment: she knows how to feed the desire not just to hear or read a story but to live it as well.