Lansing State Journal - http://www.lsj.com

Harry Potter book to swoop into local bookstores
By KATHLEEN LAVEY
Wednesday, June 18th, 2003

On Saturday morning, Cecilia Ballesteros will get her hair done for her sister's wedding.

And she'll have a copy of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" in her hands while the stylist works.

"I'll probably be reading it at the church while we're waiting for the guests to come in," laughed the 29-year-old Okemos woman, a music student at Michigan State University.

So strong is the spell cast by J.K. Rowling's boy wizard that hundreds of children and adults around mid-Michigan will stay up past midnight Friday to snap up the fifth book in the Harry Potter series during the first minutes of its authorized release.

They'll attend bookstore parties, wear Potter costumes, swap Potter trivia, and settle down for the weekend to read the 896-page tome about the bespectacled boy wizard with the lightning-bolt scar on his forehead.

The Potter craze - fueled by blockbuster movies based on the first two books - may well be the hugest publishing phenomenon since Charles Dickens invented the cliffhanger in Victorian England.

"I can't give you specifics, but we have a lot of books ordered," said Pat Foster, community relations manager at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in East Lansing. Prepaid orders for the book total in the hundreds, she said.

She's hard-pressed to think of a book with bigger hype than this one.

"Maybe Harry Potter four," she said. That book, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," arrived in 2000 with similar fanfare.

At Bestsellers in Mason, owner Jamie Robinson has prepaid orders for about 200 copies of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." In contrast, the store has sold about 25 copies of Hillary Clinton's ballyhooed autobiography.

The previous four Potter books have sold more than 80 million copies combined in the United States. "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" will have a first printing of 6.8 million copies, quickly followed by 1.7 million more. That's a U.S. publishing record. The previous record was 4.5 million, set by "Goblet of Fire" in 2000.

Ballesteros hopes to get to a bookstore party after her sister Olivia's wedding rehearsal dinner Friday night.

On Monday, she was re-reading the third book, "Harry Potter and the Prison of Azkaban," to refresh her memory on Potter details.

"I was going to read the fourth one, too, but don't know if I'll get to it," she said.

Joining Ballesteros in the preparatory reading is 9-year-old Tommy Shauver of Lansing. He's halfway through the 734-page "Goblet of Fire."

"I'm not done yet," he said. "I won't get it finished by Friday."

That won't stop the Cumberland School fourth-grader from dressing the part and staying up late Friday. Tommy has been Harry Potter three times for Halloween and has the drill down.

"I want to dye my hair black, and I want to have a fake scar on my head and I want to use my fake wand and my fake glasses," he said. "I want to buy a new robe."

Jeff Guillaume didn't really catch on to the Harry Potter craze until the summer of 2000.

"I thought it was another fad like Pokemon or Tickle Me Elmo," the 23-year-old Lansing man said. "I thought it was the big thing of the new generation stuff for kids."

Then his sister, three years younger than he is, recommended it.

"I was hooked, literally, after the first paragraph of the first chapter," he said. "I became a bigger fan than anyone else in my family."

Guillaume, a Web designer by day, soon got tired of surfing for Harry Potter news tidbits, so he designed the Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator (www.hpana.com), which sifts the Web for new Harry Potter tidbits each day.

Up since October, it's been getting about 3,000 hits a day. It has been tapped to become an official Google News Service site and hits have gone up since an item about it appeared in the New York Daily News on Sunday.

"Traffic has been increasing steadily," Guillaume said.

Guillaume expects to attend the Potter party at Schuler Books & Music in the Meridian Mall.

"It'll be 12:30 when I get home and I'll read until I fall asleep," he said. "I've talked to the other Webmasters and we've all agreed to kind of shut down our sites for the weekend so we can read the book."