Despite Sales, Some Not Wild About Harry

Think magic and dragon’s blood and hats that sing. Think about a nerdy English schoolboy with a lightning bolt-shaped scar. Now, think publishing earthquake. Think nine printing firms in this country, working 24 hours a day to churn out 15 million books that already are spoken for. This is the success story of Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling’s fictional orphan who has commandeered top spots on adult bestseller lists across America.

But not everyone is crazy about the books. In fact, some people are downright mad about Harry.

After his father blasted Harry Potter as “wicked, dark and evil,” a fourth-grader in Ventura County was transferred out of a classroom where the book was read aloud. Small, scattered protests have cropped up in Michigan, New York state and Minnesota. Parents in South Carolina complained to the local school board, which promised to review the series’ contents. A conservative watchdog group in Virginia has posted a Web site decrying Harry Potter--a refugee from a horrid home life who attends the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry--as representing “the dark side of religion.”

But to fans who waited up to eight hours in line this week to have Rowling sign their books, the backlash seems misplaced and mean-spirited. In a line outside the Politics and Prose bookstore here that snaked around a full city block, parents conducted business on cell phones, teachers who had stolen the day from work graded papers and children read aloud--from their Harry Potter books, of course.

“Nowadays, we only have time to read schoolbooks, and they’re really boring,” said 13-year-old Laura Smith. “These books got me to read. I woke up one morning and my mom was reading Harry Potter. I’ve never read the same book as my mom!”

Rowling will be signing her three books--”Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”--next week in Southern California, from Irvine to Ventura. Such big crowds are expected that each store has issued guidelines, with some requiring tickets.

The Harry Potter phenomenon, said Christina McHenry, a television producer and mother of three, “tells us something about who we are and what we’re looking for. We think we have everything, and yet all we need is a little magic.”

Magic is only part of the problem, said Karen Jo Gounaud, founder of the Virginia-based Family Friendly Libraries. Toward the end of one book, Gounaud said, “they talk about death is the next great adventure. So the violence and the death culture suggested by it is of great concern.” She cautioned that parents and teachers should get off the “bestseller bandwagon.”

For such a successful series, the objections are “not surprising but still distressing,” said Jean Feiwel of Scholastic, Rowling’s U.S. publisher. Feiwel insisted that the books are not about wizardry as some far-out cult but about imagination and the tried-and-true theme of good vs. evil. This motif, Feiwel said, is firmly grounded in a children’s literary tradition that includes books such as “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz.” “So we’re in good company.”

While no individual or group has moved to ban the Harry Potter books, Feiwel said, protests that even hint of potential censorship are troubling. Parents who may not like the books “should make their own decisions,” she said. “But not for your children and not for my children.”

Since the first Harry Potter title migrated here from England 13 months ago, the hero and his motley crew of friends and foes have captured the imaginations of kids, parents, teachers and librarians who welcome the opportunity to pry small eyes away from computers, video games or TVs.

But Harry Potter’s meteoric rise should not overshadow the fact that, in a society gone mad over Furbys and Pokemon cards, this may be just another fad, warned Roger Sutton, editor of The Horn Book, a 75-year-old children’s literary digest in Boston.

In an editorial called “Potter’s Field,” Sutton lamented that “I’m feeling suckered--neither by the book nor by the publisher, but by the cosmic forces that have ordained that this likable but critically insignificant series became wildly popular.” As literature, he added in an interview, “they are nothing to get excited about.”

Wearing a hand brace as she signed more than 400 books in two hours here, the 33-year-old Rowling was not in a mood to talk to the press. But her story has become almost as well-known as Harry’s.

Rowling began writing stories at age 6, dreaming that one day she would become the next Jane Austen. She was well into a novel for adults when Potter sprang into her head during a train ride in 1990.

At the time, Rowling was a single mother living in her native Scotland. While her daughter napped, Rowling would write at cafes in Edinburgh. It is true that she briefly received public assistance, but Rowling hates to be portrayed as a welfare mom who struck gold. Her advance in 1996 for the first Harry Potter book was $3,300.

As they waited for her signature here Tuesday, many parents talked about Harry Potter as if he were the boy next door. (Joanie Edwards gave up a steady date with her treadmill to be in line at 8 a.m.). They’ve read the books, often while curled up with their children at bedtime. Some feel betrayed when their kids get up early and read ahead of them. Others worry that, in the four books Rowling has promised to complete the series, Potter might grow up faster than their own children. The prospect that, as she has indicated, Rowling may kill off one or two key characters also has unhinged some moms and dads. “I hope it won’t be Hermione,” said Priscilla Doris-Siegal, a public policy analyst here.

Warner Brothers has bought movie rights to the series, with the first film set to appear in 2001. Stock prices for Bloomsbury Publishing, the British firm that bought Rowling’s first book after others rejected it, have skyrocketed. At Scholastic, Feiwel admits that the numbers she bandies about when discussing the book’s printing schedule sound almost comical, particularly in the context of a book that was launched with 50,000 copies.

Books that bubble up from the ranks of young readers are certainly not unheard of. Scholastic published the popular “Babysitters Club” series. And books from the “Animorphs” and “Goosebumps” series have vaulted onto adult bestseller lists, along with titles by Dr. Seuss and Chris van Allsburg.

But the velocity of Harry Potter is something else.

“It’s unprecedented,” Feiwel said. “It’s mind-boggling.”

It would be easy perhaps to attribute Harry Potter’s success to some form of magical intervention. Instead, said Anne McGann, the book manager at San Marino Toy and Books, where Rowling will appear Sunday, Harry’s popularity reflects well on the children who are clamoring for him.

“Kids have intelligence. They can appreciate good books, and this is proving that,” McGann said. “They don’t have to be fed slop.”

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Times researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.