NEW YORK, Aug 1 — As the rain poured down, a man with a Harry Potter phoenix feather tattoo on his forearm waited patiently on the Brooklyn sidewalk.
The man, Robert Saulter, a lawyer in Boston for the US Air Force, was in New York for the weekend and said he just had to be at Saturday’s midnight book release party for the latest in the Harry Potter series: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One and Two, which is actually a play.
“It sounds ridiculous that I’m 32 years old and I’m tearing up,” he said as BookCourt opened its doors. “But I always felt misunderstood and I feel like, if you’ve read the books, you understand the emotional connection you get to Harry, someone who really wanted to do good things with the world and wanted to feel loved.” Saulter even named his son Phoenix Harrison, who is 7 months old, for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — the fifth book in the series.
Saulter was one of nearly 200 people who waited outside the Cobble Hill store for the script that was written by Jack Thorne and based on a story by Thorne, John Tiffany and JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter book series that led to films and a theme park.
The play, which opened in London over the weekend, has already become a critical, commercial and — with the casting of the black actress Noma Dumezweni as Hermione Granger — controversial hit. It continues where the final book left off, as Harry and his crew send their children to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Rowling has made it clear that Cursed Child is not an eighth Harry Potter novel, but the fans do not care. The book already topped the 2016 pre-order charts for Amazon’s print and Kindle e-book sales.
It has been nearly 10 years since the publication of Deathly Hallows, what many have considered the final chapter in Rowling’s story. And Mary Gannett, an owner of BookCourt, said she was not even sure the store should host a party this time.
Interest trickled in slowly after the script’s publication was announced in February, Gannett said, but in the past week, requests for reserved copies nearly doubled.
In New York and across the country, so-called Potterheads swarmed bookstores Saturday night and into yesterday morning to celebrate the release, as if they found the secret winged key that not only let them back into their childhoods but also opened the door to another generation.
Judy Stelter, the manager of Book World in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, was expecting a smaller, older audience for the store’s midnight party. Instead, she was greeted by teenagers and young children with their parents, who filled the small store to enjoy cake and chocolate frogs (a treat among wizards).
“Look at all the young kids in here,” she said, standing beside boxes of Cursed Child.” “They’re in here for a book that’s in print and on paper, not on an electric device. Once they read like that, they’ll read for life.”
Many fans happily brought family members who were not old enough — or even born yet — for the celebrations of the original series.
In Georgia, Erin Whitlock, 24, brought her 12-year-old brother Liam to a Barnes & Noble in the Edgewood
“He’s as big a fan as I am, and it’s just really cool to be here tonight because he gets to experience what I grew up with,” Whitlock said, noting that her brother visits Rowling’s website Pottermore, where she regularly publishes new stories. “The wizarding world doesn’t stop with the books. It goes with your imagination.”
Aubrey Nolan, 25, who planned the evening at BookCourt, said she wanted to keep the activities family friendly. All around her, children sipped cream soda floats they passed off as butterbeer and decorated wands with paint, sequins and string. Still others had mug shots taken that resembled the wizards imprisoned at Azkaban.
Bookstores around the country embraced the theme wholeheartedly, too, with Books of Wonder in Manhattan offering photos with live owls (like Harry’s Hedwig) and the Charles Deering Library at Northwestern University outside Chicago refereeing a Quidditch match, a sport played in the Harry Potter series.
At the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, nearly 250 people showed up for what was billed as a Hogwarts Reunion. And, members of the Seattle Shakesbeerience performed the first few scenes from the play with Patrick Lennon — who said the group’s motto is “script in one hand, drink in the other” — as Harry.
“I’m in the group that aged along with Harry,” Lennon, 30, said. “One of the actresses says she’ll probably be crying through it. I might, too.”
For some, nothing was more important than getting their hands on the newest edition, even if it meant waiting alone or interrupting a vacation.
Annie Grandidge and Travis Dicks, tourists from New Castle, Australia, spent 2 1/2 hours in line at the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. And Ashley Johnson, 32, the actress who played Chrissy Seaver in the 1990s sitcom Growing Pains, showed up at BookCourt by herself, knowing She recently moved to Brooklyn to work on NBC’s Blindspot.
“I was a little angry that I didn’t read these as I was growing up. I found them in my mid-20s, and I never got to go wait in line for the original books, so to be a part of that I felt like I needed to go do it,” she said. “We don’t get to do this with a lot of things with how fast the world moves, and to wait in line for a book at midnight feels really special.”
Margaret Piraino, 24, dressed as Nymphadora Tonks, a half-blood witch, complete with rainbow hair and Potter-themed jewelry on her wrist, attended the BookCourt party with her friend Laurel Detkin, a fellow Potter enthusiast. But it was different this time without her father with her.
“I grew up with Harry Potter, and it’s been my entire life, and my dad would go to Barnes & Noble with me every time there was a new release,” Piraino, who lives in Brooklyn Heights, and it’s the first time I had to go on my own.”
In Seattle, Dylan Blanford, 13, donned a long black robe and yellow tie as a member of Hufflepuff, one of the four houses at Hogwarts, and said he was jealous that he was not at parties for the previous Harry Potter books. He started reading the books when he was 5.
“I’m excited because like there’s still this little 6-year-old jumping around inside of me going, ‘Harry! Harry! Harry! And there’s also this 13-year-old jumping around inside of me going, ‘Harry! Harry! Harry!'” he said. “I’m so excited because it’s not the end, forever, you know?” — The New York Times
