The universal hysteria over the seven Harry Potter books seems unique yet there are precedents for it in publishing history. Like Haley's Comet, mega-bestsellers streak across the literary sky at intervals and watch out when they do. Sometimes they can kill their authors.
To recap the astonishing statistics: of J.K. Rowling's first six books, 325 million copies have sold in 200 countries, translated into 64 languages. In Canada, 10 million copies have sold in the decade since the series began, tripling the annual revenues of its local publisher, Raincoast Books, to about $70 million.
Two years ago, the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sold 650,000 in Canada in its first weekend, 6.9 million in the United States. Amazon.com took 1.4 million pre-orders for the final instalment of the saga, released today. Will Harry vanquish Lord Voldemort or will the malevolent lord triumph over the boy wizard?
To find another example of such anxious public curiosity about the fate of a fictional character, you have to go back to 1840, when Charles Dickens was writing The Old Curiosity Shop.
The story ran in instalments in Master Humphrey's Clock, a periodical created for him by his publishers, Chapman and Hall. Like Rowling's multi-part work, it built momentum as it unfolded.
In brief, a saintly pre-pubescent girl, Little Nell, is trying to escape with her grandfather from some very bad people to whom the card-playing grandpa owed money.
Sales of the periodical climbed steadily (they reached 100,000 when Britain had a population of 26.7 million) as the rigours of their flight caused Nell to fall gravely ill.
Dickens was besieged by readers pleading that he save the life of Little Nell. As the novel neared its climax, people gathered on the docks of New York to ask those disembarking from London whether Nell was dead.
"She was. But he had kept his readers hanging on through 88 weekly episodes," says the literary historian Gillian Fenwick, who teaches at Trinity College, University of Toronto. "Dickens was the first author celebrity, filling theatres for his public readings and doing North American tours that we might compare to those of modern rock stars. He was sensational."
The Old Curiosity Shop, which made grown men weep, cemented Dickens's relationship with his audience but he wrote at a time before compulsory public education raised literacy levels and Allen Lane invented the paperback. Books were luxuries few could afford, and he generally sold only 50,000 copies of his novels. Publishing was a cottage craft practised by gentlemen and nothing so grubby as promotion was contemplated.
It was not until the next century – and on the other side of the pond – that the cult of the mega-bestseller emerged when Macmillan published Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Mitchell, a journalist, wrote her sprawling Civil War story in secret and only reluctantly handed it over in a suitcase to the New York based publisher, who had come to Atlanta scouting for new southern writers. She did not think it good enough.
Published in June 1936, it sold an unheard of 1 million copies in six months, and 2 ½ million by Christmas, 1937, after it had won a Pulitzer Prize. The popular movie with Vivian Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler pushed sales still higher. The website of the Margaret Mitchell museum in Atlanta claims that "it sold more copies world wide than any other book except the Bible." In 1949, Margaret Mitchell died in a traffic accident.
Another publishing phenomenon was Peyton Place, two decades later. Grace Metalious, a slovenly, rebellious, 32-year-old New Hampshire housewife penned the scandalous story of adultery, rape, incest and wife beating among the outwardly respectable citizens of a small town as a thinly veiled attack on the hypocrisy of her neighbours.
Its commercial potential was immediately recognized by New York publisher Kitty Messner, who came up with the title and had the idea of hiring an aggressive publicist to create buzz prior to publication. The publicist called up powerful friends in the media to tell them that Metalious's teacher husband had been fired because of the as yet unpublished novel.
A week before it appeared in September 1956, Peyton Place was already on the bestseller lists and such lead-up publicity has since become standard practice in the industry. It sold 100,000 copies in its first month and went on to sell another 12 million copies, was made into a film and eventually into a prime-time television series that made the young Mia Farrow a star. Metalious had little time to enjoy her success; she drank herself to death at 39.
Mario Puzo's The Godfather became a publishing phenomenon in 1969, aided inevitably, by three hit movies based on Puzo's ample material about the Corleone Mafia family.
According to the Official Mario Puzo Library website, the book sold 21 million copies in hardback and paper by 1997.
Another phenomenon was the top-selling novel of 1970, Erich Segal's sentimental romance about a beautiful Radcliffe student who dies, Love Story.
And of course, more recently Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code (2003), came from nowhere but through careful marketing and crossover appeal to the Christian book-buying community, sold 12 million hardcover copies in North America alone over three years before being issued in paperback last year, going on to sell a further 5 million.
Each of these books has upped the ante. They have made publishers more expert at marketing and also greedier, helping to create the current media/entertainment/industrial complex that has produced the Harry Potter phenomenon. Filming such books is now a must.
Embargoes, threats of lawsuits, midnight store openings, simultaneous releases in countries around the world are the latest ham-fisted innovations.
The jury is still out on whether this is good for literature in the long run.
Judy Stoffman can be reached at judystoffman@gmail.com.
