New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com

Mad about the boy
By COELI CARR
Sunday, June 15th, 2003

For Harry Potter fans all over the city, next Saturday ushers in much more than the summer solstice. That day also heralds the release of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," the fifth installment of author J. K. Rowling's publishing phenomenon.

"There has never been anything like this," says Peter Glassman, the owner of Books of Wonder, who will reopen his Chelsea store at 11:30 p.m. Friday and start to sell "Phoenix" at midnight.

"Three years ago, when the last Harry Potter book was launched at midnight, our store had, like, a thousand people show up — it was a huge turnout," he says. Glassman recalled how an employee of a competing bookstore stopped by the Books of Wonders line and tried to seduce the waiting customers with promises of no waiting and a discount. "Our customers booed and hissed her," Glassman says.

Muggles have tried to rationalize the mania surrounding the bespectacled boy wizard. According to Glassman, it's due to a combination of factors. "It's the humor, the magic, Harry, his relationship with his friends, his yearning for family," he says. "It hits on many, many different levels. I think the best thing is to compare it to a soufflé. You have all these ingredients. If you put them together just right, you get something incredible. J.K. Rowling is the master chef."

Glassman's Saturday event — which he has been planning "since they announced the book" — includes two live owls and a handler from the Theodore Roosevelt Wildlife Conservancy on Long Island, face-painting, grab bags, specially designed Harry Potter bookmark premiums, a sweepstakes and, yes, lots of books.

Laura Miller, the book critic at Salon.com, says the source of the spell these novels cast lies in how they "lift you out of your daily experience and give you an enchanted version of the dilemmas every person faces."

Miller, who'll be reviewing "Phoenix" for Salon, also plans to wait in one of Friday night's many bookstore queues. Noting that books No. 4 and 5 in the series are "probably the most heavy-duty embargoed [books] in the book industry, ever," she adds that the embargo itself becomes kind of a publicity stunt. "As soon as you tell people, 'You can't have this, you can't see this,' then they really, really want to see it," she says.

Do they ever.

Desperate Harry aficionados of all ages, in efforts to keep current with even the smallest pieces of advance information, have sidled up to Web sites like mugglenet.com, the-leaky-cauldron.org and the news-collecting site hpana.com.

"As soon as a fan site gets wind of it [a leak], they're in a battle with each other constantly to see who's got the info up first," says Galadriel Waters, author of the "Ultimate Unofficial Guide to the Mysteries of Harry Potter"; her Web site, wizardingworld.com, helps fans "sleuth those mysteries."

Waters believes the secrecy surrounding each novel's content is the point of the series. "The whole thing is seven volumes of an epic mystery where people are on the edge of their seat to find out what's going on," she says. "Holding back that information increases by tenfold what it is the people are looking for."

OMINOUS DEVELOPMENT

Last Thursday, a 105-second extract from the U.S. audio recording of "Phoenix" was made available on Amazon.com and AOL. Some Web sites have also posted information that originally appeared in publisher Scholastic Inc.'s summer/fall catalogue. Those descriptions include "a Defense against the Dark Arts teacher with a personality like poisoned honey," "a venomous, disgruntled house-elf" and "Ron as keeper of the Gryffindor Quidditch team." More ominous is the mention of Harry's dreams "of a single door in a silent corridor."

Arthur A. Levine, the editor at Scholastic responsible for bringing the series to the U.S., does not feel that the series' increasingly darker tone is worrisome. "Great children's literature has always acknowledged the difficult side of life," he says. As to the publisher's desire to keep a lock on content until Saturday, Levine says it's "just a fun part of the relationship between J.K. Rowling and her fans."

One Manhattan fan, 11-year-old Chloe Glickman, understands the motivation. "With the suspense, you're going to get a lot of people interested," says Chloe, who has read all the novels, has listened to the audio books multiple times and acknowledges that the Books of Wonder "event is part of the excitement." She doesn't plan to race through the 800-plus-page volume, though. "I like to take it more slowly so that it'll last longer, because I don't know how long it's going to be till the next book comes out," she says.