The History of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Much of the information about the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince many know about, but there are certain aspects that are more obscure. It is kind of fascinating in a weird sort of way.

June 29, 2004
J. K. Rowling announces the title of her next book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

December 21, 2004
J. K. Rowling delivers the manuscript to Bloomsbury and Scholastic and a laydown date of July 16, 2005, is announced.

March 30, 2005
Scholastic announces a first printing of 10.8 million copies. (Trees around the world shudder.)

April 28, 2005
Listening Library signs Jim Dale to record Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, for a first printing of 635,000 copies, the largest ever for an audiobook.

May 5th, 2005
5.5 million temporary tattoos sent to retail accounts.

June 1, 2005
Scholastic announces a library sweepstakes where the winner is to receive the first signed copy of the US edition.

June 3, 2005
First related security breach where two men were arrested occurs in England after they tried to sell two copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to a reporter. Both were ordered to stand trial and released on bail.

June 4, 2005
10,000 flashing Harry potter pens were given out at the BEA. Attendees make a beeline to eBay where these pens are now selling for $4.99.

June 20, 2005
Barnes & Noble announces more than 750,000 preorders for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince have been generated. Final tally will top one million while Amazon’s US orders go over 800,000.

June 27, 2005
First shipment of the books arrive at Barnes & Noble’s main warehouse in NJ. The company expects to receive 124 tractor-trailor loads weighing more than 4 million pounds. They expect to sell 50,000 copies an hour. (B&N CEO Riggio is a media slut)

July 1, 2005
Scholastic announces the 10 winners of its “Why I Love Reading Harry Potter” essay contest. 8000 entries were received (there was an age limit). The winners will be flown to England on the evening of July 15 to hear J. K. Rowling read from the book. They given a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to read on the flight.

July 2, 2005
The single signed copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for the library sweepstakes arrives in NYC on the Queen Mary 2. It was packed in a steamer trunk and met by an armored car for pick-up. Almost more security than for the actual Queen.

July 7, 2005
The Real Canadian Superstore in Coquitlam, British Columbia, sells 14 copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Raincoast Books, Harry Potter’s Canadian publisher, gets a pre-emptive injunction to prevent disclosure of the book’s contents. Purchasers of the book were asked to return their copies in exchange for a signed book plate. White House senior advisor Karl Rove denied responsibility.

July 11, 2005
Greenpeace starts a campaign called Save Muggle Forests where they urge Americans to buy Raincoast’s Canadian edition of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as a protest of Scholastic’s not printing the book on 100% recycled paper.

July 12, 2005
A pharmacy in upstate NY sells one copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The nine-year old customer admits to having read two pages and immediately makes 2000 new freinds.

July 13, 2005
In the wake of the London terrorist bombings, WH Smith changes the venue of its Harry Potter party from King’s Cross train station to Wimbledon High Street.

July 15, 2005
5000 stores prepare for Harry Potter release parties. No live owls available for rent anywhere.

July 16, 2005
Many did not sleep that night, but instead read the book through the wee hours of the morning after purchasing after midnight. Websites immediately start selling t-shirts depicting who killed who.

With the Harry Potter titles, Scholastic has pulled itself up by the boot straps and is now the strutting publisher of the decade. But it is interesting to note that even though Scholastic publishes the Harry Potter titles, they aren’t the only publisher and business to cash in on it. For instance UPS made a killing just by handling the 800,000 Amazon orders. Running Press, who prints the mini books and small sideline-type kits made off with a good impulse buy ratio during the Harry Potter release week. But the big one, in a little-known deal, publisher HarperCollins has been handling all billing for Scholastic since 2001. An estimated $8-9 million was made via this deal for the new book and over the life-time of the book it could grow to $200 million. And let us not forget J. K. Rowling, whose gross net now probably rivals the Queen’s.

For all you Orlando Bloom fans out there

There's hope for all the fanboys in the world...

...and her name is Meghann Marco. Not only is she smart, witty and pretty, she's also the author of Field Guide to the Apocalypse: Movie Survival Skills for the End of the World. How can you resist a face like this:



An an author bio that goes like this:

"Meghann Marco grew up outside of Chicago, in a loving family environment relatively free from dysfunction. Were it not for hearing the words penis breath in the movie E.T., she would have probably turned out all right.
"I thank God daily that future generations will be spared the gratuitous physical violence of Han Solo shooting first," the traumatized author says.
Meghann invites fans to stay tuned for Field Guide to the Apocalypse: Special Edition, in which the word fuck will be replaced with little pictures of walkie-talkies.
This is her first book."

But all that's besides the point. If you survived an apocalyptic event in your neighborhood this book will be your bible because it isn't the event itself that's the problem, but surviving the aftermath. It will be you against them...



Ms Marco goes into detail on aspects of survival gleaned from SF films, both good and bad, extoling the virtues of preposterous movie science. Examples include how to convert a car to run on bathtub gin and how to synthesize a species-saving vaccine from your own mucus. There's also how to conceal free will and how to recognize a dream world. And if you want to have it all, there's how to be a warlord. Great fun for all you Mad Max wannabees!

More fun than the current urban US styles

The world of High Fashion, to me, is very overrated and as about comprehensible as the game of cricket. However, there always will be certain fashion statements that are commendable and more to the point, fun. Take for instance the swank area of Toyko, Harajuku, where back in the mid to late 90s, photographer Shoichi Aoki started documenting street fashion that changed from following American and European fashion to something completely their own. Teenagers were designing their own fashion, combining traditional Japanese dress with homemade and other designer fashions. The completed ensembles run the visual gamut from goth to anime and a combination of everything in-between. Aoki started a monthly photographic fanzine titled FRUiTS that showcased these teenagers and their wondrous accomplishments and in 2001, Phaidon Press (a publisher of fine art books) published a compilation of Aoki's photographs titled FRUiTS. This was followed up by a second volume just now published titled FRESH FRUiT.



Here's a sampling of some of the images as they are difficult to describe. They are , in fact, something to just view and absorb. Weird? Maybe. Silly? Maybe. But one can not deny the uniqueness that now High Fashion is attempting to copy.

High altitude baking issues

Do your cookies turn out flat and hard? Do your pies come out like a fallen souffle and all mushy? Yes, living in the high country wrecks havoc with the uninititated baker. Over the years high altitude cookbooks have been published and now we can ad another to the ranks, Pie in the Sky: Successful Baking at High Altitudes : 100 Cakes, Pies, Cookies, Breads, and Pastries Home-tested for Baking at Sea Level, 3,000, 5,000, 7,000, and 10,000 feet (and Anywhere in Between) by Susan G. Purdy.



Unlike it's predecessors Susan Purdy took the time to test recipes at varying altitude levels to get the right proportion of ingredients, baking temperature and time. So now you can bake here at home in Denver and then bake like a professional when you trudge to the cabin at Grand Lake!

Here are some of the more popular high altitude cookbooks available: High Altitude Baking: 200 Delicious Recipes & Tips for Great Cookies, Cakes, Breads & More : For People Living Between 3,500 & 10,000 Feet by the Colorado State University Cooperative Extension, Patricia Kendall; New High Altitude Cookbook by Beverly M. Anderson; Baking at High Altitude: The Muffin Lady's Old Fashioned Recipes by The Muffin Lady (aka Randi Levin, a baker out of Evergreen); and High Country Herbs: High Altitude Growing, Gifting & Cooking With Herbs by Cheryl Anderson Wright.

Yet another book award

The literary world has entered into the mainstream media with a series of awards that offer the glitz and glamor usually reserved for movie, TV and music awards. This new award is aptly named The Quills and is sponsored by Reed Business Information (the parent company of Publisher's Weekly, Variety and other publications). Similar to the focus of the Emmy and the Oscars, The Quills will be a consumer's choice award, where bookstore consumers and library users will decide the outcome. The Quills will honor the best books of the year in over a dozen different categories ranging from romance to history, biography to graphic novels. Ancillary awards will be giving for best cover, best film adaptation and best book club title as well as a Lifetime Achievement award. Winners will be announced in an awards ceremony replete with dinner party and celebrity presenters. NBC will broadcast this event on October 22.

In a quick perusal of some nominees, I found 3 local Colorado authors listed in the SF/Fantasy/Horror category: Orphanage by Robert Buettner, Dean Koontz's Frankenstein: Prodigal Son by Dean Koontz and Kevin J. Anderson and Sister of the Dead by Barb and J.C. Hendee.




The reader's have spoken... Here's wishing Robert, Kevin and the Hendees the best of luck!

You got to love parodies...

...and The Da Vinci Code is not immune from their onslaught. One even is a chick lit book!

More movie tidbits part deux

Ok, after this I promise to get back to some book info. It looks like New Line Cinema has Viggo Mortensen back in a David Cronenberg directed graphic novel adaptation, Yep, another graphic novel... Told ya they are hot commodities for Hollywood now. This one's from a smaller press and is titled A History of Violence written by John Wagner and art by Vince Locke. John Wagner may be the Dennis Lehane of the graphic novel world.



Viggo stars as the owner of a small town diner who prevents a robbery and thus attracts the attention of mobsters (William Hurt and Ed Harris). With Cronenberg at the helm this could be a wild ride indeed.

More movie tidbits

Movies based on comic books have now just begun to really hit their stride, some being more spectacular than others. On November 4th the long awaited V for Vendetta will premiere on the big screen. Looks like they are wrapping up post production now. The Wachowski brothers are adapting this Alan Moore piece. It stars Natalie Portman (you may have seen recent pictures of her with a shaved head done for the movie) and was going to star James Purejoy in the lead role, but that fell through and Hugo Weaving stepped in to make it his own. Let's hope they do it right... Just the other day they unveiled the official movie poster:



The film version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen apparently is in Paramount Studio limbo. Rumors of select role casting came out with John Cusak as Nite-Owl, Sigourney Weaver as Silk Spectre and David Craig as Rorschach. Cross your fingers on this one folks...



If you haven't read either of the aforementioned graphic novels, you now have about five months to do so with V for Vendetta before it hits the theaters. I would highly recommend it as well as reading Watchmen. These two graphic novels propelled the graphic format into the literary world. Awesome and powerful stuff.

Vacation's over and now it's blog time with something a tad different!

This is for all you TV and film buffs out there. Just recently word has come out about near future DVD releases and I'd like to share a few of the more interesting ones.

First of all finally streeting on August 8th will be Oliver Stone's Alexander. I'm not sure what the delay was but it maybe related to the dual nature of the release itself. Apparently Oliver Stone wanted a broader audience so he created a director's cut which will be released simultaneously with the theatrical version. In this case, the director's cut doesn't mean a longer movie wth additional footage, but rather an edited version where he trims some of Alexander's scenes with Hephaistion. Obviously Mr. Stone wanted to try to garner sales from those offended by reality. To make it easier to determine which is which, there will be two different covers!




Two weeks after that on August 16 Sin City will be released on DVD. You will have a choice of 5 covers for this release. That's right, 5. There's a regular cover



and then there's 4 collectible covers, each one devoted to one of the film's storylines. This cover art strategy for DVDs hasn't been used since A Bug's Life and Scream had different covers for thie VHS releases.





Then on September 6 the TV series Lost will have it's first season out on DVD. As always it will come chock full of extras, but the neatest will probably be new unaired flashbacks that will show more insight into the people on the island.