Bloomsbury announced late last week that they will be publishing a book this October, The Harry Potter Wizarding Almanac. For all the details from that announcement, your one-stop resource is TheRowlingLibrary.com; follow that link to TRL’s summary of what to expect in the book, an article I’m told more than 200,000 Potter fans have read. (Patricio Tarantino has already written up his thoughts on the Almanac which will be in this month’s TRL e-zine.)
If any doubters remain who are skeptical about the vitality of Harry Potter fandom, not the official Woke crowd but the gazillion readers who love the story, doubters who think that Rowling has in any way been cancelled, or who do not believe that the Hogwarts Saga remains the Shared Text of the new Millenium, the excitement (and sales) of Hogwarts Legacy and the Wizarding Almanac, not to mention ‘The Witch Hunt of J. K. Rowling’ podcast’s popularity, should help them see the light.
While the new book, available for pre-order, is only #337 this morning on Amazon’s best-seller list and #13 on the sub-category of ‘Children’s Fantasy,’ the #2, 9, and 12 slots on that list are filled by Harry Potter titles, #2 being the seven book series set in print now for fifteen years. Two of the top three titles on the Amazon Children’s ebook list are Potter books and all seven are in the top 25. A guide to Hogwarts Legacy is #39 on the current bestselling book list, the only gaming book there, of course.
I’m not excited about the Almanac, frankly, which promises to be a very beautiful book and an excellent Christmas present for Harry Potter fans. From what I have been read and been told, though, there is nothing new in it from the Rowling Vault miles beneath Gringotts and I doubt very much that its seven chapters, fan-service repackaging of canon material, however exciting the pictorial re-presentation of that information will be, will be anything to be shared with my grandchildren in our read-aloud time. I may buy a copy to review here if no one else does.
That being said, I am delighted by the show of enthusiasm for a new Bloomsbury Potter tome. Fantastic Beasts has been something of a bust relative to the original series, but reader engagement and interest in the Hogwarts Saga continues and seems to be making the essential jump for a classic text as Generation Hex grows up and shares it with their children. Three cheers for that and for the new and vibrant empirical evidence that the Rainbow Reich’s crusade to burn Rowling and her books at the stake has failed.
True Thomas the Seer could say to you for opposing the Woke crowd: “I’m wae to see ye, my son,” softly said the Rhymer. “Why will ye gainsay Them that it’s vain to gainsay? It’s no hard to live here in Elfland.”
‘Elfland’, indeed.
Only 208 pages? Bummer! But I am glad that Bloomsbury is publishing it.
I was at Costco in January, and they had women’s sizes Harry Potter pajamas. I had a hard time finding a common size. (Yes, for myself.) To me, it was a small sign that the Harry Potter boycott wasn’t going well.