THIS IS PART VII IN A SERIES
Given the amount of success the Harry Potter franchise has had, it not too difficult to imagine the books as a commodity. Just to be sure we’re on the same page. {pun intended} let’s define commodity:
an article of trade or commerce, especially a product as distinguished from a service.
something of use, advantage, or value. (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/commodity)
My professor included this great quote from Trish Travis to get our minds thinking about the book as commodity {the original paper is no longer accessible so I will cite my course reader here}: “separate (yet inseparable} from their lives as texts, books live for us as commodities, as a specific kind of for-profit media form within a saturated communications environment. Yet thinking about the book as a commodity, as a good that is good for thinking, does not come naturally” (Lamb, 2021, p.1).
I think the easiest way to consider a book a commodity especially in terms of such a popular series as Harry Potter, is to think about the sales. Yes, the stories are belovéd but all that love equals a lot of money for publishers, booksellers, toy makers, movie studios; all the businesses tied to getting the book and related products into our hands, or making us want to buy those items. Related to the book as commodity is the book as print culture. Print culture in general terms relates to how the way a book is produced and presented affects the society that receives it. I’ll look at both of these things in this post.
“Books, movies, even a theme park: The boy wizard's greatest trick is generating sales” (Bulik, 2007, p. 1)
Every Teacher Librarian issue with a bestseller list between the years of 1998 and 2007 that I was able to find on the Academic Search Complete database had at least one Harry Potter book listed. The tallies listed in Bulik’s article Harry Potter, the $15 Billion Man are staggering:
$390 million in advertising sales, the same as Burger King and Apple for the same year. Bulik notes that most of the advertising was for items related to the books because the books “mostly sell themselves” (Bulik, 2007, p. 1).
Rowling had a movie deal with Warner Bros. by the time the books were published in the US and the movie studio was involved with Mary GrandPré’s illustrations for the US editions (Rowling, 1998). Bulik estimates DVD sales of the movies at over $1 billion in 2007.
Packaged items, like the t-shirt and tie pictured above, as well as chocolate frogs, and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans were $11.8 million
Book sales were at $9 billion just after the seventh book’s release (Bulik, 2007).
That’s honestly an inconceivable amount of money and the numbers are only increasing, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, one of the latest version of the series {the Minalima edition} is listed eighth on Bookshop.org’s November 2021 bestseller list. The books have literary merit but also a serious amount of financial cred. At 24 years old, the series has built itself quite the fan base and each new edition {with a new cover design to help it “sell itself”} has a built-in consumer market among those who want to collect it, gift their friends the series in their house colors, or spread the love to the little ones in their lives.
As I mentioned when examining Harry Potter as author work, Bloomsbury paid a meager $1960 for the Philosopher’s Stone manuscript, and the editor famously told Rowling not to quit her day job (Harmon, 2003). According to a Forbes article from 2002, Rowling faired better with Scholastic in the US where editor Arthur A. Levine apparently loved it from the start. Scholastic would pay $105,000 for the rights to print in the US, which was apparently about ten times higher than average. It seems worth it consider the book sold 23 million copies upon it’s debut (no author, Forbes). “…the series proved to publishers that young audiences are ‘not just willing to read a book, but would follow the stories they loved the end of the earth’” (Matthews, 2020, p.120). Here we see the crossover between commodity and print culture. The publisher is out to sell books but no matter how it’s presented or advertised, if it’s a bad story and readers don’t like it, it’s not going to become a commodity or have a lasting impact on culture.
Image of a Chocolate Frog box and Wizard Trading card; two real-life items created from commodities listed within the Harry Potter series.
Commodity within Harry Potter
The reason there are packaged items to reach astronomical sales numbers in our world is because those same items {Chocolate Frogs, Wizard Trading Cards, Fizzing Whizbees, to name a few} is because they exist in Harry’s world. It’s a world of many things but one where money matters. We know Ron is poor and Harry was left a small fortune by his parents (Rowling, 1998). After winning the Triwizard Tournament, Harry donates his winnings to the Weasley twins Fred and George so they can begin their own candy commodity company (Rowling, 2000). But, if we’re focusing specifically on books as commodities, consider the fact that one of the few places we get a description of in our first visit to Diagon Alley is Flourish and Blotts (Rowling, 1998).
“They bought Harry’s school books in a shop called Flourish and Blotts where the shelves were stacked to the ceiling with books as large as paving stones bound in leather; books the size of postage stamps in covers of silk; books full of peculiar symbols and a few books with nothing in them at all. Even Dudley, who never read anything, would have been wild to get his hands on some of these” (Rowling, 1998, p. 80).
That last sentence really clinches the book as commodity in the wizard world. The bookseller is doing such a great job of selling interesting titles that even a non-reader would want them. Booksellers, as we know from Mr. Darnton, booksellers are integral a key component of books as commodities and integral to the book cycle. In fact, we meet Charles Joseph Panckouke a publisher/bookseller on page 17 of Darnton’s 617 page story of a book, The Business of Enlightenment, we meet Panckouke another 30 times according to the index and some of Panckouke’s letters are reprinted in the books appendix (1979). In contrast, paper is cited 12 times. That’s right, the bookseller is mentioned more than twice as often as the material the book was printed on. The only conclusion we can draw is that the book as a product is a very important component of its existence. Rowling also recognizes this importance and we reconvene at Flourish and Blotts in The Chamber of Secrets; this time it gets its own chapter title. “‘We’ll all meet at Flourish and Blotts in an hour to buy your schoolbooks,’ said Mrs. Weasley “ (Rowling, 1999, p. 57). Going to the bookstore is a staple of preparing for the new school year at Hogwarts and readers get the sense that books would have a hard time existing in the wizard world without the likes of Flourish and Blotts.
Image of a tabletop platen press; a type of letterpress machine.
The Book As Print Culture
If booksellers get the books into the hands of readers, print culture is about the form those books take and the impact the printed word has on the reader and the culture at large. When thinking about the book as print culture, you can thing about a book’s, and by association printing’s, impact on “communications and systems of authority, orality and literacy, impact of printing, reading authorship control and censorship, and copyright” (Lamb, 2021). Essentially, print culture is a lot of things but since the booksellers, who are looking at books as a form of commerce, are important to getting print culture to readers, I thought representing these two parts of the book cycle together made sense.
Let’s consider the importance of printed books for a moment. Before printing arrived in Europe in the mid-1400s books were handwritten and took a lot of time to make. The old adage “time is money” is true, if a book took a long time to make it cost a lot of money so only the rich had books and just about everyone else was illiterate an bookless. When I was assisting with print history lectures at San Francisco Center for the Book, the Studio Director Chad Johnson used to say “consider Europe 500 years before 1450. The rulers and borders were different but the technology was not too different at all. Now consider the world 500 years after Gutenberg innovated the printing press…we’re developing rocket science because we’re only a decade away from putting a man on the moon!” A bit of history is glossed over in that quote but suffice it to say, the printed word was very important. A lot of people complained about the Church but Martin Luther was one of the first to have access to a press print his complaints in plain German and kick off the Reformation (Johnson, n.d. but also all the time).
What’s Harry Potter’s impact? The Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy (2001) “many adults seem to be rejoicing in the fact that the Harry Potter books have brought the pleasures of book reading to a new generation of young readers…(Comber and Nixon, p.746). On the next page a librarian states that they like the books because “they have lured children from computer screens to books, has enticed boys from non-fiction to fiction…and has gotten families communicating about the books and wider issues…”(Nicola, 2001, p. 747). These quotes are not unlike some of my own encounters with the books. I devoured them and they kept me reading for pleasure (and from wasting all my tips at the bar) through my undergraduate years. Also, my mother ran daycare out of the house growing up and one of the girls she babysat wasn’t the biggest fan of reading but one day mentioned she like the Harry Potter books. To keep the girl interested in reading, my mother challenged her to a reading race (my mother can read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in a day). They talked about those books every weekend for years creating a fond memory around printed matter.
Of course we cannot forget that the Harry Potter series is now a transmedia one expanding beyond the books to movies, digital works, an interactive digital realm and video games (Garcia, 2017). According to USA Today, the entire series was released digitally in March 2012 via Pottermore {now the Wizarding World} (Clark, 2012). The digital realm for Harry Potter also includes a confusingly named J.K. Rowling Archive featuring additions and explanations to the popular stories about everything from wand cores and magical laws to vampires and patrons charms. The release of the books in digital form doesn’t appear to have slowed it print popularity, especially knowing that both Scholastic and Bloomsbury continue to re-release the titles.The variety of ways to interact with the stories makes them incredibly accessible regardless of your reading age, level, or format of preference. The books’ popularity is ongoing and more studies need to be done but I have a hunch that having Harry Potter in print, digital, or whatever comes after, will continue to impact the lasting impression they have on society.
Citations
Bulik, B. S. (2007). Harry Potter, the $15 Billion Man. Advertising Age, 78(28), 12–13.
By Cindy Clark with wire reports. (n.d.). Now on sale: Harry Potter digital books. USA Today.
Comber, B. and Nixon, H. The Harry Potter phenomenon. (2001). Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 44(8), 750.
Darnton, R. (1979). The business of enlightenment: A publishing history of the Encyclopédie 1775-1800. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Harmon, M. B. (2003). J.K. Rowling: The Real Life Wizard Behind Harry Potter. Biography, 7(9), 82–85.
Harry Potter And The Triumph Of Scholastic. (2002, May 9). Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/2002/05/09/0509harrypotter.html?sh=1fb2c8f356f7
Lamb, A. (2021). The book as print culture. Course reader from The Book 1450+ at IUPUI.
Lamb, A. (2021). The book as commodity. Course reader from The Book 1450+ at IUPUI.
Matthews, C. (2020). J.K. Rowling. TIME Magazine, 195(9/10), 120.
Rowling, J.K. (2000). Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Arthur A. Levine Books An Imprint of Scholastic.
Rowling, J.K. (1999). Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets. Arthur A. Levine Books An Imprint of Scholastic Press.
Rowling, J.K. (1998). Harry Potter and the sorcerer’s stone. Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Press.
Nicola, R. (2001). Returning to reading with Harry Potter. (2001). Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 44(8), 750.
*Some citations for web resources are linked directly in the post (in blue).