By the end of the series we were all wise to her tricks, but in Sorcerer’s Stone it was downright shocking to learn that, no, the sinister potions instructor who’s always swooping around like a bat and saying menacing things is not, in fact, the villain. Rowling loves to misdirect, to hide her villains in plain sight and distract you with innocent red herrings. And that’s the puzzle box mystery, the world building, and, most of all, the British boarding school tropes. In some places - most notably Harry’s climactic confrontation with dull, stammering Professor Quirrell and a Voldemort who has not yet managed to acquire a personality - it’s downright weak.īut what works in this first book really works. The later books feature a lot of epic fantasy/hero’s journey stuff and coming-of-age stuff, but all of that’s mostly gestured at in Sorcerer’s Stone. The Harry Potter books are a mishmash of a few different genres. The best part of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is only halfway magical A normal book with all the other normal books at the Scholastic Book Fair.Īnd then, of course, magic happened, and the book became a phenomenon. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was just a book. It was a budget on the high end of normal. Still, this was nothing out of the ordinary. The company developed a reasonably aggressive marketing campaign - no midnight release parties, just standard bookselling tricks like paying for the book to be displayed on the front tables at Barnes & Noble. (Scholastic actually wanted to go with Harry Potter and the School of Magic Rowling was the one who came up with "sorcerer’s stone.") Rowling’s editors pushed her to let them alter the original title, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by taking out "philosopher" to make the book more appealing to children. So it invested in the production design, which including an eye-catching and soon-to-be-iconic cover. While the book’s British sales had been healthy, there was no indication at that stage that this particular book would become a beloved international bestseller.īut Scholastic had high hopes. Scholastic had shelled out $105,000 for American rights to the title - about 10 times the average - and the publisher wanted to recoup some of its costs. Sure, even then the book had high production values. It’s easy to forget, in the face of all the hoopla, that when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone came out 20 years ago, it was just another book on the Scholastic Book Fair tables. In 2016, when Scholastic released the script book for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, its publication was accompanied by all the theatricality we’ve come to associate with Harry Potter releases: midnight launch parties, embargoes, and a furious black market for spoilers. It’s hard to remember Harry Potter before the franchise became a phenomenon "Mom," I said, "can I get this one? Please?" I had terrible handwriting as a child. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, spangled with stars and looking weighty and solemn and magical, I couldn’t resist picking it up. But when I first saw the purple and gold hardcover of J.K. Mostly I went for the paperbacks I had a book-a-day habit, and hardcovers were a rare treat. They gleamed against the library’s familiar collection of shabby older books, and I would wade into the feast and glut myself. Scholastic would set up shop in the school library, piling stack after stack of shiny new books on the tables. When I was 9 years old, the greatest day of the school year was the day of the Scholastic Book Fair.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |