Celebrating Harry’s 10th Anniversary

By Julian Bennett Holmes, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 9/25/2008

Our teen reporter, who covered J.K. Rowling's final Harry Potter reading, attended Scholastic's recent read-a-thon, and shared his thoughts.

Many Harry fans came to the  read-a-thon in costume.

On September 1, 1998, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was released in the U.S. Since it was the first book of the series, no one was eagerly anticipating its release, as they did for the more recent installments, so there was no fanfare. Now that the book has been out for 10 years and has sold over 120 million copies, Scholastic decided to celebrate the anniversary with an all-day read-a-thon at its headquarters in Manhattan. Hundreds of Harry Potter fans sat in J.K. Rowling’s throne (the one she read from at Radio City) and read, bit by bit, the entire book over the course of the day, as thousands more fans watched via a live webcast from home or school.

The event didn’t have the same feel as, say, the release party for the seventh book, but that didn’t stop the most dedicated fans from arriving at 12:30 a.m. (the event started at 8 a.m.). They were from “The Group That Must Not Be Named,” a group of hardcore Harry Potter fans who organize through the website Meetup.com.

Several celebrities, including Kurt Loder, KayCee Stroh from High School Musical and Marcia Gay Harden (shown here), stopped by to lend their voices to the event.

A small line contained people waiting to read; as each person only read a couple pages, the line moved fairly quickly. Around lunchtime it was filled by mostly Scholastic employees, but schoolchildren filed in as the afternoon went on, and the reading became much more crowded.

The read-a-thon ended at about 5 p.m., two hours ahead of schedule, but it seemed that everyone who wanted a chance to read got one. It may not have been the same as a real midnight Harry Potter party, but it was still nice to be able to commemorate the 10th anniversary.

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