It was just a book back then. There were no queues. No grown adults in costumes, waving wands. No blockbuster movie franchise, no video games, no theme parks. Twenty-five years ago this weekend, the first Harry Potter book was published, having previously been rejected by 12 publishers. The legend goes that Bloomsbury chief executive Nigel Newton waved Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone through because his daughter had enjoyed reading the manuscript. Surely, 500 million copies later, she should be getting a cut.
No one can predict what our next big cultural phenomenon will be. What we do know, though, is that it won’t ever be like that again. Harry Potter was the last great collective obsession of an analogue age. It came from a time before binge-watching, before memes, before Amazon Prime. We used to do this thing called “waiting”. Our online, on-demand culture has changed habits so fundamentally that it’s remarkable to think that a significant number of those 500 million readers actually went to a bookshop to get their copies.
