I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book, including that I find it interesting primarily because I can’t access the book. I don’t know if it is a collector’s item, or will become one, but it definitely tells us a lot about reading in the summer of 2007 and looking back on it from 2020.
Like a lot of readers (including adults), I was a fan of the Harry Potter series and I had quickly pre-ordered a copy of the last in the series from Amazon, which promised to deliver it on the day of its release, July 21, 2007. As it turned out, I had to be out of town that day, visiting my mother. My spouse bought a second copy of the book and had it delivered to me at her house. And that was the copy that I opened and started reading. The original copy was intact in its box when I returned home, and it’s stayed there ever since.
I don’t remember what my reaction to the book itself was. What I see now when I look at this time capsule is a complicated delivery system that is just the tip of a mammoth business, both for Jeff Bezos and for the book’s American publisher and the book’s author. I see a book that has monetary value as a collectible as long as it stays in its box forever: first US editions of the 7th book are surely a dime a dozen, but equally surely, copies still locked away in their cardboard containers are few and far between.
I also see a lot of loss. I was visiting my mother because my father had died six months earlier; she died from Alzheimer’s five years after that summer. I see a sign of how much my then-spouse was trying to care for me in those little gestures, even though we ended up getting divorced thirteen summers later.
And I see the profound disillusionment that I have in JKR’s hatred of trans lives and the revolt I feel now towards her and the ambivalence that has led me to feel about the books and movies. How can someone whose fiction believes in the possibilities of transformation be so unable to see the glorious trans lives that surround us? But I also think that she no longer owns those stories. She wrote them and her readers loved them and her fans have transformed them and brought them into their lives. If the world of Harry Potter is something that you have loved and that has brought you comfort, don’t let her take that away from you. She’s in that cardboard box and can’t see her way out; we have the characters in the bright day of our lives and the meanings we make from them are ours.
by Sarah Werner