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Mahany, Barbara. “Everyone’s Wild About Harry: Pint-sized Wizard is Taking over the U.S., Starting with the Kids,” Chicago Tribune (IL), July 23, 1999

When Tempo last visited Harry Potter, boy wizard of best-seller fame, he had just landed his broomstick on American shores after taking the U.K. by storm. Licking our pinkie, sticking it way high in the air, we predicted Hurricane Harry would similarly blow through the U.S., from sea to roiling sea.

Well, it has been nine months, and — wait just a sec while we smooth our tousled hairs — this Potter chap has turned out to be the literary phenom of the year, if not the last quarter-century of the millennium. (Harry, for those few of you who don’t know, is the hero of two wildly successful British children’s novels by J.K. Rowling. An orphan with unruly hair and a lightning scar on his forehead, poor Harry doesn’t know he’s a wizard until an avalanche of letters on the eve of his 11th birthday informs him that he (a) is a wizard and (b) is enrolled at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Equipped with flying broom and magic wand, he is off to soak up lessons in potions, history of magic and quidditch, an airborne sort of soccer. Good versus evil has never been so charming.)

And get a load of this: The first of those novels, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” has been on the New York Times best-seller list since two days after Christmas and is now No. 6 on the list. As of the second week in July, there were 826,000 copies in print in the U.S. And in two years, it has been published in 115 countries in 25 languages.

The second, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” published on June 2, is No. 5 on the New York Times best-seller list, pole-vaulting onto that list a mere two weeks after publication. Some 915,000 copies of “Chamber of Secrets” are in print.

Warner Bros. has options to make movies of the first two Potter books, with merchandising rights, so Harry Potter toys are no fantasy.

A third book, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” is due in U.S. bookstores on Sept. 8 and was just published in England, where 24 hours before publication it had surpassed “Hannibal,” the title cannibal of Thomas Harris’ grisly new novel, on the Amazon.com.uk charts.A headline in the British newspaper The Guardian proclaimed: “Hannibal Eaten for Breakfast by 13-Year-Old.”

And when the book went on sale 15 minutes after school ended on July 8, there were reports of stampedes of children going from schoolyard to bookstore.

But that’s all just numbers and headlines. Young master Potter has so captured our fancies, whole families are taking turns (or hiding copies under pillows), racing toward the last page to find out how Harry fares this time. Even boys, reluctant readers of fiction, are picking up Potter, the unlikeliest of noses to be stuck in Harry’s spine. At camp, on the beach, under the covers, Harry Potter, prestidigitator, has sprinkled his own brand of magic all over the landscape.

In Hyde Park, Allie Brudney, a lass of 9, is so taken with Harry that she has started riding a broom up and down the sidewalks this summer, all the while wearing a witch’s hat and calling herself Harriet Potter, Harry for short. And, when she turns 10 next weekend, she’s throwing herself a Harry Potter birthday party. It’s BYOB — bring your own broomstick, of course. “We’re gonna have races on the broomsticks,” says Allie, who just finished 4th grade. “And we’ll have black robes so everyone will be wearing black.” The invitations, each of which took 45 minutes to copy from the book, were all done in green ink, just like Harry’s invitation to Hogwarts, the boarding school for wizards. The cake, your basic 9-by-13, baked by Allie and her mother, Ellen Rosendale, will say, “Welcome 1st Years–Happy Birthday Harry (Allie),” all in green icing. “We had decided my dad would be Professor Dumbledore (the headmaster and great wizard at Hogwarts) and take my brother away. But now he has to go with my brother somewhere so he doesn’t bother us,” says Allie who, thanks to Plan B, will be free from pestering as she and seven of her best friends Potter the night away. “I lie in bed every night and think about Harry. If I’m thinking about something, somehow I always relate it back to Harry Potter.”

In Oak Park, Ilyas Dagli, who just turned 12, is mad for Harry, so mad that for his birthday his mother, a children’s literature professor, secured him a treasure that has made him the hit of the neighborhood. While in New Orleans at the recent American Library Association convention, she got word that Scholastic Press, the American publisher of the Potter books, was offering one eye-popping deal: For 10 smackeroos, you could snare a copy of “Chamber of Secrets,” a T-shirt and a pre-publication copy of the third book, the one not yet sold in bookstores here. “I grabbed it the second she walked in the door,” reports Ilyas, who is going into 7th grade. “Well, maybe not the first second, but definitely the first minute.” He gulped it right down, stopping only to eat dinner and catch a short night’s sleep. He had devoured the book by 11 the next morning. “It was like a sacred relic, reading the Koran or the Bible,” says his mother, Ann Carlson, who teaches at Dominican University in River Forest. “It’s now making the rounds of all his friends.”

In Deerfield, you couldn’t check out the Harry Potter books if you wanted to, not without a wait that likely will stretch into the coming school year. “We have four copies of the first, and we’ve had to order three more,” says Cindy Schilling, a youth services assistant at the Deerfield Public Library, where 15 names are on the waiting list for the first Potter book. “The second one, ‘Chamber of Secrets,’ we already have six copies; we learned from the first one. Those are all out, and we have three people on the waiting list. “The books are never on the shelf. Some people so desperately wanted the second book (before it was published here), if they knew anyone going to England they asked them to bring it back.”

Now you didn’t think it was just little people reading this, did you? Says Zena Sutherland, considered something of the godmother of children’s literature in the United States, among other things (having backed Maurice Sendak, author of the classic “Where the Wild Things Are,” when he was a nobody), officially professor emerita at the University of Chicago, where for years she taught and edited the esteemed Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books: “I first heard about this when a friend of mine — she and her husband are very literate people — heard of its success in England. Finally her husband was inspired to try Amazon.com to get a copy from England. Their son was smitten by it, totally smitten. “I have very high regard for his literary taste — he just turned 12 — so I said, ‘When he’s finished, can I read it?’ “Oh, I loved it.”

Such is the magic of one boy wizard and his trusty broomstick.

Copyright (c) 1999, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved.
Source: Newsbank