A look back on Pottermania...

[jenk]

Yes, now that I've read the book, I'm reading reviews and articles about the book. From The New York Times:

[T]he Harry Potter craze was not manufactured by a media conglomerate. Its initiating publisher in England, Bloomsbury, is a stand-alone company, as is Scholastic, the publisher that presciently acquired the American rights. When Volume I, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," was published in America in September 1998, its first printing was 35,000, with a promotional budget of $100,000. That's above average by the standards of children's-book publishing but a mere drop in the media maelstrom.

The book's success bubbled up spontaneously from below, propelled by kids' word of mouth, rather than being imposed by synergistic browbeating from above. At first adults didn't get what was happening. The New York Times, for instance, did not review the first "Harry" until five months after its publication. By that time, "Sorcerer's Stone" had been on the Times's fiction best-seller list for 14 weeks — well past the three-week record for a young readers' book on the list, set by E. B. White with "Charlotte's Web" in 1952.