My audiobook listening time is currently being consumed by Tracy Kidder’s wholly absorbing Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World. If you haven’t yet had your eyes and mind opened widely by a reading of this book, I urge you to rush out and get your hands on a copy immediately. In his September 14, 2003 review for the New York Times Book Review, Abraham Verghese wrote the following, which pretty well sums up the feeling many of us have had while reading this book:

”Mountains Beyond Mountains” is inspiring, disturbing, daring and completely absorbing. It will rattle our complacency; it will prick our conscience. One senses that Farmer’s life and work has affected Kidder, and it is a measure of Kidder’s honesty that he is willing to reveal this to the reader. In 1987, a book called ”And the Band Played On” changed the direction of my career and that of many physicians of my era who decided to devote themselves to the care of persons with AIDS; I had the same feeling after reading ”Mountains Beyond Mountains”: that after I’d read the book something had changed in me and it was impossible not to become involved.

Read this book and see if it doesn’t change you. Then sit down and read a few books by Roald Dahl.

Ophelia Magdalena Dahl, one of Roald’s daughters, features prominently in Mountains Beyond Mountains because Ophelia herself features prominently in the success of Paul Farmer’s award-winning non-profit health care organization, Partners in Health. Ophelia is, in fact, a co-founder of PIH and its current director. She has worked tirelessly to provide quality health care to the world’s poor since her first trip to Haiti at the age of 18.

What are the common threads, I wondered, between the motivations of a man who writes books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and the motivations of a woman who delivers comprehensive health care to Third World countries plagued by malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS? It turns out I missed what would have been a very convenient chance to hear Ophelia answer my question herself, when she delivered the 2006 commencement address at Wellesley College (a stone’s throw from our bookstore!) barely a year ago. In her address Ophelia explained:

I grew up with a courageous and talented mother, a stepmother who flew from England to be here today, and a father who wrote stories for a living—mostly for children, which is good if you were his child.

He pushed up against limits to a delicious degree. For the first 10 years of my life, I had been fed nightly stories of “fleshlumpeating giants” and “snozwangers” and “vermicious knids.” I was convinced that a “fire-breathing bloodsuckling stonecheckling Spitler” lived in the woods outside my bedroom window….

My father led me to believe for years that passing a mathematics test had more to do with which dream powder a giant blows into your bedroom window that night than actually studying for an exam. He was convinced that imagination would be the most vital ingredient for a fulfilling life and told me that if, at times, all you have is your imagination, you will rarely feel alone…. Through his gentle urging I have relied on my imagination enough to make it less of a jump to connect my life with the lives of those I can’t see. I urge you to do the same because a great deal of what you do will be influenced by your ability to imagine an improved outcome, or a better device, or a more efficient system, a new vaccination, or a vastly different Supreme Court.

Imagination will allow you to make the link between the near of your lives with the distant others and will lead us to realize the plethora of connections between us and the rest of the world, between our lives and that of a Haitian peasant, between us and that of a homeless drug addict, between us and those living without access to clean water or vaccinations or education and this will surely lead to ways in which you can influence others and perhaps improve the world along the way. 

If Ophelia’s introductions to her father’s flights of fancy sowed the seeds of her success, then she has arguably validated the defense Roald wrote in the February 1973 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, in response to some rather scathing remarks by Eleanor Cameron:

We have had five children. And for the last fifteen years, almost without a break, I have told a bedtime story to them as they grew old enough to listen. That is 365 made-up stories a year, some 5,000 stories altogether. Our children are marvelous and gay and happy, and I like to think that all my storytelling has contributed a little bit to their happiness…

From the number of reviews I’ve written lately you wouldn’t know that I’ve been reading much in the way of current or forthcoming middle grade and YA novels, but of course I have been. This week I’ll post a few reviews by way of playing "catch up."

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown; September 2007)

With his new young adult novel Sherman Alexie joins the swelling ranks of adult authors now attempting to write for a younger audience. I say "attempting" because many of these authors miss the mark — they construct characters who feel like clichéd approximations of children or teenagers, or (more frequently) write in voices that read either too old or too young. Fortunately Sherman Alexie has managed to avoid these pitfalls in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a YA novel that is fresh, funny, seemingly authentic, and 100% winning.

Reportedly based on Alexie’s own life story, The Absolutely True Diary… introduces readers to Arnold Spirit, Jr. (a.k.a. "Junior"), an awkward social outcast whose life initially grows even worse when he makes the unheard-of decision to transfer from his impoverished Spokane Indian Reservation school to an affluent, all-white high school some distance from the rez. As you’d expect, the white students at his new school don’t exactly embrace Arnold and make him part of the in-crowd. Their seeming indifference to his existence, though, isn’t half so damaging to Arnold’s morale as the Indian students’ attitudes toward their friend-turned-traitor. Thinking Arnold must believe he’s somehow better than them, his Indian peers turn their backs on him altogether — when they aren’t trying to beat the life out of him, that is.

It’s this complicated, emotionally fraught dynamic that makes Alexie’s novel so much more complex than most "outsider on the road to insider" stories. Arnold makes a knowing choice to leave the rez because he’s confident that staying there will mean a life with no future — a life almost certain to be characterized by alchoholism, depression, poverty and a death as senseless as the many that punctuate this story. To Arnold, the prospect of a life free from these trials is worth being shunned by his tribal community, worth the loss of his friends, worth hitch-hiking or (if need be) walking the 22 miles to and from school each day, worth trying to forgive himself for choosing one part-time life over another.

Lest I paint this picture too darkly, though, let me say that The Absolutely True Diary… is ultimately neither depressing nor disturbing. It’s honest. And funny. And wonderfully memorable. Much as Jack Gantos did with his autobiographical Hole in My Life, Alexie tells Arnold’s (and parts of his own) story with enough humility and humor to save it from the weight of its own themes and make of it something meaningful, sincere, and greatly entertaining. Put this into the hands of a high school boy and odds are you’ll find him actually reading it, and no doubt enjoying it too.

HOW TO TURN A TOTEBAG INTO A SKIRT in 10 (somewhat) EASY STEPS

Supplies: scissors, self-adhesive Velcro, black duct tape, a totebag or two made from plasticized paper or _____ (insert actual name of this material here)

1.) Cut the straps off one totebag.

2.) Remove the seams that connect the bottom panel to the rest of the bag and remove one of the bag’s side seams, so you’re left with a long rectangle consisting of 4 panels (2 wide, 2 short). To remove the seams, I recommend carefully snipping the seam threads, rather than removing a couple of threads then tugging at the seam tape. The latter will cause you to shred the sides of the panels. (Yes, I learned this so that you wouldn’t have to.) Throw away the cloth seam tape, unless you can find some clever use for recycling it. If you’re working with tall rectangular totebags like the HP7, the bottom panel of your bag will be shorter than the side panels, so you can throw this out as well. (Again, unless you can think up a clever use for it.)

3.) Plant yourself in front of a mirror and wrap the 4-panelled rectangle around your hips. If it easily encircles around your derriere and overlaps by maybe five or more inches, congratulations! You’re skinny enough to require only one totebag for this project. If, like me, you’re better-equipped for birthing, take another totebag and repeat steps one and two, as you’re going to need to steal an extra panel (or more) to be sure you can breathe in your little totebag number.

4.) Once you’ve got a sense of how many panels you should add to your skirt, you’ll probably want to go back to your original 4-panelled rectangle and remove all the seams so you won’t have ridges sticking out of the skirt wherever the panels meet. You could theoretically leave the original seams in (as I originally thought I would), but those ridges are likely to make your life difficult when you get to step #6 (adding darts).

5.) If you removed the side seams from your 4-panelled rectangle, you’ll now need to replace them and return them to their long rectangle shape, using (drum roll please…) duct tape. Lay the panels out side-by-side in the order you want their patterns to progress around your skirt (here’s a place where you can be creative!) and center a long piece of duct tape (a bit longer than the height of your panels) over the seam where they meet. (It doesn’t matter if your panels are face-up or face-down when you do this.) Wrap the ends of the tape over the top and bottom of the panels. If you’re adding an extra panel (or panels) to your skirt, add it/them to those from your original 4-panelled rectangle in the same fashion.

After you’ve done this for all the seams and you’re back to having one big rectangle again (consisting of 4 panels + however many you added), flip the big rectangle over and do the same thing to the other side. This will anchor your seams AND give your skirt a nice streamlined appearance. (Vertical lines = good.)

6.) Stand in front of the mirror and wrap your bigger, now flatter rectangle around your hips again, then take a deep breath, as this is the point where things get a bit tricker. If you’re a woman whose hips are larger in circumference than your waist (as is usually the case), you’re likely to have a sizeable gap between the very stiff waistband of your soon-to-be-skirt and your actual waist. (Just like what would happen if you wrapped a rectangle around a sphere.) To eliminate that gap in material this stiff, you’ll have to make darts (angled seams) at the top of your skirt, so that it’ll curve with you.

While holding your soon-to-be-skirt around your hips with your left hand, take your right hand and pinch the fabric along the back of your right hip, so that the soon-to-be-skirt’s waistband now lays against your actual waist on your right side. Note how much you’ve pinched and see how the fabric pinched between your fingers forms a triangle that’s wider at the top of your skirt and then narrows away to nothing as the skirt rounds its way over your derriere. Hold onto that triangle as you let go of the skirt with your left hand, then take your scissors and cut the triangle off along its longest side. Take another strip of duct tape and tape your skirt back together, so that the top edges of the skirt are touching again. The panels of your skirt will curve toward one another when you do this step, so it helps if you picture yourself taping it together inside a bowl — the bottom edge of your sliced dart will meet at a wider point than the top edge (your waistband).

Go back to your mirror.  How’s the skirt fitting now? Better on one side, probably, so do the same thing to the other side. Still have a funny gap in another place? Add another dart. And maybe another one if you were timid that first time. Eventually you’ll have solved the problem and your skirt will fit like a plasticized paper dream.

7.) When you think your darts have done the trick, wrap a long, long piece of duct tape (cut into shorter pieces if that makes it easier) over the top edge of the waistband so you won’t get scratched by the bag material.

8.) Wrap your on-the-verge-of-being-a-skirt around your waist again and notice how much it overlaps. Be sure to leave a bit of extra "give" so that you’ll be able to SIT in the darn thing, then stick that self-adhesive Velcro in between your overlapping pieces, so that you can rrrrrrrrrrip! take that skirt off and put it back on again in no time flat.

9.) If you want to be sure you can walk comfortably in your skirt, consider cutting slits partway up the seams between your skirt panels, like I did. Cover over the each sides of the split seam with more duct tape and place a short piece of duct tape across the top of the slit in letter "T" fashion, to keep it from ripping any further as you raise your knees.

10.) Put on your new totebag skirt and pat yourself on the back. CONGRATULATIONS!

Below you’ll see how my skirt looked from the back, after I added a duct tape pocket when I realized I’d need a place to put my office key. Some of my seams below had to be reinforced at the end of the night, as they were showing signs of wear (a.k.a. pulling apart a bit in the middle). Of course all I did to remedy this was reinforce them with more duct tape. If only all tailoring jobs were this cheap!

In my previous post, I mentioned the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows totebags that Scholastic was giving away this year at BEA, ALA, and San Diego Comic-Con. Made from a material resembling "plasticized paper," they are shiny and bright and a bit more prone to coming apart at their cloth-taped seams than their fabric-made cousins.

Here’s a front, back, and side shot of the bag:

And here on the right of this unflattering photo is me in the skirt I wore to our recent Harry Potter celebration, alongside Elizabeth Wolfson, our summer intern, in an apron you just might recognize:

Look familiar? Yes. As is the case with Elizabeth’s apron, my skirt was once a totebag. Two, actually. I happened to have two Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows totebags that were each coming apart a bit along one seam. Being without wizard garb and in need of festive HP7 launch party apparel, I took the bags apart and reassembled them as a skirt using a whole lotta patience and three magical tools — scissors, self-adhesive Velcro, and black duct tape. During our party, my skirt received numerous compliments, all from people who were shocked to learn it was a totebag in a former (earlier that day) life.

I will give you five words of caution, though, if you’re thinking you’d like to sport one of these little totebag numbers: plasticized paper does NOT breathe. I repeat: it does. NOT. breathe. Fortunately I was able to spend most of our HP7 evening in the relative comfort of our air-conditioned store, but even then, let me tell you, my hips have never been hotter (literally, that is — figuratively, I’m not the best judge of that).

Despite the heat, I wore my hot, hot HP7 skirt until the end of our long but lovely evening. As proof, see the photo of me casting a spell of "orderliness" over our late-night, line-forming crowd in "Image 3" of the great event pictures that ran this week in the Wellesley Townsman.

Unfortunately I didn’t think to take photos of each step of my skirt’s assembly, but I’ll list the steps I followed in my next post and hope they’re sufficient for anyone interested in following them with some plasticky totebags of their own. Perhaps you’ve got one of those plasticky Captain Underpants bags you could adapt and wear, making a VERY entertaining first impression. (Can you imagine seeing someone wearing a skirt boldly emblazoned with the words "TIME FOR NEW UNDERPANTS!"??  The very thought of it sends me into a fit of giggles.)

If there’s one thing booksellers and librarians seem to have scores of, it’s… totebags. (You thought I was going to say books, didn’t you?) My closet at home is cluttered with them, my car holds a stash for all my grocery runs (the eco-friendly bagging option), and my colleague Lorna and I keep a collection of ’em in our office for trips to the library and post office or those frequent occasions when we find ourselves lugging home a supply of books or catalogs for review. Each time we think we’ve got enough totebags to last us for all eternity, someone shows up and gives us another one, making our respective collections grow ever larger. Last week we acquired a totebag from Mariner Books, compliments of John Mendelson, our Houghton Mifflin rep. A few weeks ago I received one from the Bacon Free Library, with thanks for my recent book talk. Before that our supply was compounded by time spent at BEA, which might as well be called Bags Expo America given the number of totebags handed out at the show each year.

I’m not complaining about this surfeit of totes. On the contrary, I find totebags incredibly useful, as do most of us, which is why we have a hard time saying no to new ones, especially those featuring books (or bookstores!) we love. In my dream world I’d be offered a totebag that features To Kill a Mockingbird so I could walk around with Atticus on my arm. And wouldn’t a Clarice Bean bag be fun? (Or maybe a Clarice bean bag?).  How many Kiki Strike books would Bloomsbury have to sell to think it worth creating a Kiki Strike bag, to tote my essential spy supplies? And oh how I wish Kazu Kibuishi would create a Daisy Kutter tote, featuring my favorite gal gun-slinger! (I’ve got Kazu on the brain, as I just finished the galley of his forthcoming graphic novel Amulet and feel confident it’ll be a BIG hit with kids of all ages, mine included. You can see the process of inking and painting the book on the Amulet page of Kazu’s website.)

Our store sells a doozy of a children’s totebag, thanks to the wonderful Peter Reynolds who was kind enough to work with us to come up with a design, before he opened (and designed totebags for) his OWN lovely bookstore, The Blue Bunny. Here’s the bag Peter designed for us:

Our totebags are the traditional cloth variety, sold to us by the wonderful folks at Enviro-tote. In recent years, though, some publishers have switched to giving away bags made from a thinner, slicker material made out of (as best I can tell) some sort of plasticized paper, stitched together with cloth tape along the seams. Penguin created a lovely bag of this nature for their Puffin Modern Classics series and for last year’s Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? Scholastic previously gave away bags of the same material promoting Captain Underpants (one side of the bag boldly announces, "Time for New Underpants!") and this year gave away plasticized paper bags featuring (what else?) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

These plasticky bags are bright, shiny, and I’m guessing a bit less expensive to produce than their cloth counterparts. (Perhaps someone reading this can tell me whether or not that’s the case?) They have the advantage of being (relatively) waterproof. Unfortunately they also have the disadvantage of holding up less well than the cloth variety. Hence the reason we wound up with two brand new …Deathly Hallows bags that were already coming apart along one seam. You might think it a sad circumstance to have two ripped totebags, but one bookseller’s trash is another bookseller’s treasure. I turned those two totebags into a Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows skirt that I wore at our big book launch party — a suitable substitute for wizarding robes, if you ask me. In my next post I’ll reveal the DIY magic behind my no-sew Harry Potter skirt, so y’all can make some of your own from the next plasticized totebags that come your way.

Of the non-Wellesley-Booksmith totebags in my collection, my personal favorite is one that Candlewick gave away a couple years ago, to promote The Tale of Despereaux. Like our store bag, it’s black with yellow ink, but it’s larger, much simpler design-wise, and quite sophisticated for a totebag, as it features only the words Candlewick Press and the silhouette of a small (but very brave) mouse. It may not advertise itself as boldly as most, but that’s part of the reason I use it so much. And my using it so much means it’s being seen by far more people than it would be otherwise — a suitable trade-off to the "screaming" marketing tactic, I think.

And you? What’s your favorite totebag? Or how about the ugliest totebag you’ve ever seen? Share your stories, fill us with totebag envy. Tell publishers whether you prefer a zipper, a pocket, long straps or short.

Last night Gareth and I spent a fantastic evening at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square. A wonderful old art-house cinema most evenings, the Brattle became a concert venue last night for musicians Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, currently performing together as The Swell Season. The duo’s stars are currently rising at a furious rate, fueled by the success of Once, the new film in which they play the romantic leads, and the turn-out for this concert proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that this pair has truly "arrived." When we got to the Brattle, the "standby" line of people hoping to get into the sold-out show was just as long as the line of ticket-holders. We were certainly fortunate, blessed, thrilled to be in the latter group, as this concert was one of the best I’ve attended in a long, long time.

Last night’s trip to the Brattle afforded me the opportunity to see more than just music, though. I also saw something I come across so VERY rarely: graffiti referring to children’s books. Stop and think for a moment: when was the last time you visited a bathroom stall or empty alleyway and read something about a character from a picture book or a chapter book or even (while it might seem more fitting) a young adult novel? Truth be told, I see this every day, as we’ve got a "graffiti stall" in our women’s room where we scrawl book-related remarks all over the case, but that’s a topic for another post. In this case I’m talking about real, illegal, scrawled-in-a-public-place-that’s-not-a-bookstore-or-publisher children’s book graffiti. Have you seen it ever? No? Then you probably haven’t visited the right-hand stall of the women’s restroom at the Brattle.

In the right-hand stall, on the right-hand wall, someone keen to hold onto cinema gems like this one has written "I love the Brattle!" And below it someone else has written, "Everyone loves the Brattle! Even Anastasia Krupnik," and then there’s an arrow drawn to some explanatory text below it which reads, "in the books by Lois Lowery [sic]."

Upon reading this lovely little note I confess to experiencing two very clear emotions: the first was a secret thrill to have glimpsed an elicit mention of a children’s book, and the second was a prickly annoyance at the fact that this scribbler misspelled Lois Lowry‘s name. I suppose you can’t take the children’s book nerd out of the children’s book renegade.

Have you had graffiti sightings like this? Seriously?  If so, do tell. I once saw "I love Alaska" in the bathroom of a local coffee shop, but, alas, I’ll probably never know if it had anything to do with the Alaska introduced by John Green in his beloved first novel. Knowing how much some people hate Junie B. Jones (as was recounted in today’s New York Times), I can’t help wondering if there aren’t a few unflattering slurs on her name in water closets somewhere. The Fuse #8 (a.k.a. librarian Elizabeth Bird) was quoted in that article, but she didn’t mention having seen any in the Donnell Central Children’s Room, so…? Perhaps at preschools then. In crayon. With invented spellings.

If you want to hear the music that got me out to the Brattle last night, you can watch and listen to The Swell Season tonight (July 26th) at 9:30pm when NPR.org will be airing a live webcast of their performance at Washington D.C.’s 9:30 Club. Or you can go take in a screening of Once, preferably at your local independent movie theatre.

All week long I’ve been hearing fantastic stories about fellow booksellers’ Friday night Harry Potter celebrations, and so many have made me wish I could somehow have been in multiple places at once (our store being one of them, of course)!

The Flying Pig Bookstore of Shelburne, Vt., set up a huge tent that featured activities in Divination, Herbology, Wand-Making, and Potions. At the latter, one little guy kept excitedly repeating "I’m a wizard!! I’m a real wizard!!" as he watched his purple cabbage juice change colors and foam before his very eyes. Meanwhile, at Quail Ridge Books and Music in Raleigh, N.C., a crowd of 2,000 passed the time petting snakes, admiring a beautiful snowy owl, and meeting Harry Trotter, a miniature horse in costume complete with glasses and lightning bolt. The venerable Powell’s in Portland, Ore., had a celebration in the streets and kept a running commentary throughout the evening on the store’s blog. Be sure to take a peek at their very authentic-looking Dumbledore.

Of all the parties I’ve heard about, though, the one that turned me greenest with envy was that held in the town of Sandwich, Mass., home of Titcomb’s Bookshop. Read my next post to see why.

As mentioned in my previous post, the Harry Potter festivities I’m the sorriest to have missed last week were those that took place last Friday in Sandwich, Mass. Wonderful booksellers Vicky Uminowitz and Elizabeth Merritt of Titcomb’s Bookshop shared their description of the town’s Harry Potter Day activities, which I’ve reprinted below, complete with photos (many more of which will soon be appearing on their website). I think the town of Sandwich deserves a special prize for being so willing to share their resources, talents and genuine enthusiasm for the celebration of a book!

Here’s what Vicky and Elizabeth had to say:

We had such a fun Friday!! The day began with an opening ceremony at our 1850’s Old Town Hall, which had been transformed by town hall employees into a fabulous Ministry of Magic. Professor Trelawney led the ceremony, our town manager read a proclamation and the Weasley family (children’s librarians from the Public Library) arrived in an antique car from Heritage Museums and Gardens. People met Hagrid’s Fang, a Neopolitan mastiff as featured in the movies!

Next to town hall is our 1600’s gristmill, which became the Shrieking Shack, where an incredible Professor Lupin lurked in werewolf costume – jumping out from the machinery to scare people. Hagrid could be found at the 1600’s Hoxie House where the MSPCA taught about "Care of Muggle Creatures". These museums opened their doors to people at no cost and the curators were delighted with their participation. Heritage Museum and Gardens featured programs all day, including a magician, an herbology class and a search through a maze to find the Tri-Wizard Cup. The Thornton Burgess Society taught potions classes throughout the day and the Sandwich Glass Museum opened their doors for a tour of the magic of glass.

The Wizard Express, run entirely by Sandwich High School librarians and their incredible students, including the entire football team, whisked 1,120 people on train rides from our little train station, complete with costumed characters, games and Platform 9 3/4. In addition, we had 3 Knight Buses (2 trolleys and a school bus) running all around town to take people to their destinations, with characters from the books riding along and interacting with visitors. Every penny raised from the trip will support the high school library, which recently learned that their book and materials budget for next year is $0!!

At the library, people were sorted into houses and the Sandwich Mom’s Group provided free face painting, several crafts for children and Madam Pomfrey, who offered bandages, sunscreen and bug repellent to visitors. Our bookshop had parchment invitations to Hogwarts which children could sign with a quill pen and ink and a fabulous Divination Course run by two expert volunteers. Pumpkin juice and spider legs were served to all. The Sandwich Women’s Group held a bookmark contest at our 3 elementary schools. They printed up thousands of laminated bookmarks, which were distributed free at several locations in town.

Throughout town, businesses were transformed into Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade businesses. We distributed Marauder’s maps encouraging people to visit each business where they had to find a Hedwig owl and get their map stamped. The owls will be the prizes. Five restaurants offered a variety of Harry Potter meals, did some incredible decorations and were jammed all day. This was a great success and was coordinated through the Sandwich Chamber of Commerce. A highlight for me was the performance of gymnastics by the Beauxbatons, a group of Junior Olympic gymnasts, and a Quidditch match by middle school students.

The whole town came together in an extraordinary way to celebrate our community and reading. Almost everything was free and funded with grants from the Kiwanis Club of Sandwich, the Sandwich Visitor Services Board and a local business. The Kiwanis grant included 50 train tickets and 50 copies of the book to be given to children who would not otherwise be able to afford them. Thousands attended and so many people commented on the wonderful sense of community they saw as people came together to make this possible.

The day ended with midnight parties at the Sandwich Public Library and at our store. Somehow, our amazing and very small team managed to provide Flourish and Blotts at both! At the library visitors could have their picture taken in the "Living Portrait" featuring Phineas Nigellus Black, knit hats for house elves and sign an S.P.E.W. petition, make a jeweled goblet, take a ride on the Knight Bus, and stroll down the "Hall of Recall" with objects from each book, including a pensive! At our shop we had tea leaf reading, crafts, trivia, a fabulous cake shaped like a 3D Hogwarts which was donated by a customer, and a wonderful countdown to midnight.

Of course, we were open at 7:00 the next morning!!

I’m riding on a post-Harry high but battling post-Harry fatigue today. At the store we’ve sold out of books and are scrambling to get more, hoping most of our customers can be convinced to wait until tomorrow when we’ll receive another shipment. What a ride it’s been!

Friday night’s party saw us entertaining a crowd of 700-800 people and thanking our lucky stars that everything worked liked a charm. This weekend found me reading the book from cover to cover and reveling in it. I loved the way Rowling brought it all home for her readers and personally found it deeply satisfying. I laughed, I cried, I called my friend Janet from my CAR (!) so that Gareth, who started reading well after I did, wouldn’t overhear any of the details.

Huddled up in this relatively sound-proof place with the phone pressed to my ear as Janet and I squealed over Rowling’s revelations and shared our sympathies, I felt completely like a kid again — a kid stealing away to swap secret gossip and giggle uncontrollably. I could just hug J.K. Rowling for giving her fans so many moments like this.

In all, I’d describe my entire Harry-filled weekend as "utterly exhilarating." Coming later this week: an account of the HP party I most wish I’d been able to attend, a photo or two from our fiesta, and a how-to on the article of clothing I made for Friday night’s fun.

I am really, truly, genuinely thrilled that this weekend I’ll be devouring the long-awaited seventh book about Harry Potter, for two reasons. 1.) I’m looking forward to seeing all those mysteries at last unraveled, and 2.) By that point all the distracting pre-Harry-release-day hype and hysteria will finally be over and the real fun (the bonding and the reading) will begin.

On Friday the wonderful staff at the Wellesley Free Library are hosting a full day’s worth of Harry Potter-inspired activities, followed by a "flashlight parade" to our store, where the festivities will continue until midnight. In compliance with the rules established by Warner Bros. we are not having a full-scale bash complete with fireworks or copywright infringements, but we are having face-painting and food-eating and hat-making and trivia. When the magic hour arrives we will put copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows into hundreds (we hope) of hot little hands, attached to kids and adults who will head home to practice the finely-honed craft of binge reading, until they pass out from exhaustion or reach the final page of Rowling’s saga — whichever comes first. It’s a beautiful image, really — millions of people reading the same book at the same time, burning the midnight oil, filling the world with the rustle of pages. But then? Then it’ll be over. And oh, how sorry I am to see this series (and the whole Harry phenomenon) come to an end.

I first fell for Rowling’s charms in 1998, when I was a bookseller at Kids Ink Children’s Bookstore in Indianapolis, IN, learning the fine art of children’s bookselling from the wonderful Shirley Mullin. Shirley was one of those savvy owners who got in on the Harry craze from the start and began importing the books from the U.K., where the Brits had already caught Harry Fever. I remember the absurd rate at which the first two books burned their way through the entire Kids Ink staff and began working their way into the bags of our customers. By the time Scholastic published the American edition of the first book, we were already anxiously awaiting the publication of book 3, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

The phenomenon of midnight book launch parties began with the arrival of the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Hooked on bookselling, I had by that point moved to Hanover, N.H. to take the job of Co-Children’s Book Buyer at the Dartmouth Bookstore. I can vividly remember the pains I went to to convince everyone working at our store that this book was going to be a big deal. A HUGE DEAL. A "stay open until midnight" and dress our booksellers in wacky costumes deal. My efforts were more than validated when our line of 600+ customers stretched down around the corner and along the side street, where I yelled myself hoarse, explaining to one section of the line after another how the evening’s events would go, how the line was progressing, etc. That was the year Scholastic under-anticipated the demand they’d have for the books and cut our order without telling us. As a result that was also the year we ran out of books well before we ran out of midnight customers. Our best consolations were the fact that every other store in the Upper Valley had done the same and (more importantly) that our customers were understanding, fine, perfectly happy to have waited in line for two hours, only to be told they’d have to come back in a day or two when we’d have more books to sell to them. Their patience and good-natured acceptance of the situation would be almost unheard of today, but at the time we were all aglow with the feeling that we were part of something huge and surprising and truly magical. Standing together in wacky wizard robes, parents grinning from ear to ear, children giddy with excitement, none of us could quite believe that so much fuss and so much community could be built around a BOOK, of all things.

Now here we are, seven years later, and I recoil at the thought of how customers would react today were any store to run out of books at their midnight celebrations. The rise of the Internet and the superstore has contributed greatly to the desire for instant gratification — the assumption that every store should be equipped with its own enormous warehouse, or at least the ability to ship books overnight at no extra cost.

Today Amazon.com is selling Harry Potter for less money than we (and they) pay to buy the book from Scholastic in the first place. Huge as Amazon now is, they can afford to lose money on every sale of the book, whereas bookstores like ours, like Kids Ink, like all the other independents who were the first to champion this series in its early days, cannot.

What we can provide, though, and will this Friday night, is that same magical sense of community that permeated our midnight event at the Dartmouth Bookstore (now a Barnes and Noble, I’m sorry to say) seven years ago. The UPS driver pulling up in front of your house with an Internet bookstore delivery can’t give you that. The online communities of rabid readers writing their own fan fiction and hatching their own conspiracy theories can’t give it to you either. To truly appreciate the magic of what J.K. Rowling has done to put children’s literature on the map, you have to physically be in the presence of others who have read the books, loved the books, and can’t wait to get their hands on the next one. It’s the same experience you can have, on a much smaller scale, on almost any day, at our independent bookstore and at others like ours; it’s the reason most of us fell in love with bookselling in the first place: bonding over books is a powerful experience. Sharing the excitement of a great story is a tradition that predates even the printed page and will go on long after Harry has gone his way or Voldemort’s way or Neville’s way or whatever direction Rowling turns out to have been leading us.

I suppose this, to me, is the greatest consolation as this chapter in the history of children’s literature closes — that another one will open. And that there will still be, will always be, a place in it for those of us who read good books, recommend good books, and make it our first ambition to share them with you, in person, sometimes even at midnight.