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Change Your Life! |
'Harry Potter' emerges from the ‘Pot’ |
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July 9, 2000 NEW YORK (AP) —
Children and adults, unwilling to wait until morning, swamped bookstores
across America into the wee hours Saturday, eager to read the latest
exploits of Harry Potter, the boy wizard. The midnight Friday
sale of ``Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'' rolled through the country
at stores offering parties, refreshments and, in some cases, sleepovers.
Web-based companies like Amazon.com and Kozmo.com gave others the chance to
get the books as fast, if not faster, from their homes. ``Do you feel like
you're entering Willie Wonka's factory?'' asked Peter Glassman, owner of
Books of Wonder in Manhattan, as he opened the store to buyers minutes
before midnight. Outside, Dave Lambert,
28, and Kathleen Soule, 36, of Hoboken, N.J., said they were fans of the
first three Potter books.
``Early on she created
characters you can relate to,'' Lambert said of author J.K. Rowling. Soule
agreed, adding that the books ``don't talk down to children ... and they
don't talk down to adults either.'' In suburban Los
Angeles, more than 100 children showed up at a Border's store in Santa
Clarita, Calif., two hours before midnight for a party that included a
trivia contest, scavenger hunt and readings. Kids got a lightning
bolt stamp on their foreheads on the way in, a nod to the unusual birthmark
of the books' title character. A few of the kids showed up costumed as Harry
Potter complete with thick, round glasses and tall magicians' hats. Like most of the
parents at the Santa Clarita event, Debbie Jelen, mother of 7-year-old Kali,
was willing to give herself up to the hype. ``I'm excited that it's helping
her to learn to read books,'' she said.
``We're going to get
started tonight,'' said Tricia Pace, mother of Tovia Gehl, 8, in Seattle.
``My mother has read them and my brother has read them — and he's 50 and a
priest.'' At Quail Ridge Books
in Raleigh, N.C., Margo Arrowsmith, 52, said she was buying the book for
herself. ``The writing just keeps getting better,'' she said. At a Barnes &
Noble in Towson, Md., a suburb of Baltimore, the book was sold only to
customers who had reserved copies. ``We're in line for
nothing,'' said a disappointed Jennifer Moulton, who was with her daughter,
Brianna, 13. ``We started to order online at Amazon, but we thought this
would be more convenient, which turned out not to be true.''
The unusual scene left
several bookstore workers in awe. ``It's unbelievable,''
said Kim Fetty, manager of Taylor Books in Charleston, W. Va., of the late
night crowd there. ``I've never seen anything like it. It's not just the
kids. Adults are crazy about this book, too. Harry is a classic underdog and
most everyone likes to see the underdog win.'' Pat Smith, manager of
the largest Barnes & Noble in Iowa, said she had underestimated the
crowd at the West Des Moines store. ``I knew there would
be a big turnout, I just didn't know how big. I'm figuring 700 to 800
people. I gave out at least 500 tickets for the line,'' Smith said. At another Barnes
& Noble store in Chicago, Louren Mack, 11, held the 734-page book and
said: ``It will last me about a week. They are really hard to put down.'' The Wild Rumpus book
store in Minneapolis, Minn., was pummeled by a heavy storm that knocked out
power fifteen minutes into the sale, forcing workers to manually run credit
card slips. ``It's the perfect
Harry Potter night,'' said Grace Vermeer, 12, standing in the rain outside
the store. She said she had planned a sleepover party with five friends. Scores of kids waited
outside a Waterstone's bookstore in Piccadilly Circus to buy their 640 pages
of excitement at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. (The U.S.
version is longer because it has a different type face.) Like Waterstone's in
Great Britain, some stores in the United States invited youngsters to bring
sleeping bags and await the witching hour. The Chapter 11 store
in an Atlanta mall hosted about 150 people to a pajama party. ``I've got caught up
in it. I'm having the same problem everybody else is. He (Jason) goes to bed
and I keep reading,'' Lathbury said. Amazon.com employees
at warehouses in Seattle stacked books floor to ceiling preparing to ship a
minimum of 250,000 copies the first day. The company's Web site
had tallied up more than 347,000 sales — more than six times the existing
prepublication record set in March by John Grisham's latest novel, ``The
Brethren.'' New York-based Barnes & Noble said it already had 360,000
pre-orders and expected to break records for first-day and first-week sales
for any book in the company's history. The first print run by
the book's British and U.S. publishers totaled 5.3 million copies. Some bookstores broke
the embargo set by U.S. publisher Scholastic Inc. and began selling copies
early. Tom Schuppe, an
independent bookstore owner in Stockton, Calif., said he had not signed an
agreement with the publisher to make his customers wait. By Friday morning,
he had sold out of his 50 copies. ``It's everything you
dreamed about when you were young,'' said Masaka Fukouka, 29, outside a
Manhattan Barnes & Noble. ``The candystores, learning to fly, it's like
going back to your old dream.'' |
