- When Nigel Newton, the founder of Bloomsbury Publishing, brought home a manuscript for “Harry Potter.
- The Philosopher’s Stone” by a then-unknown J.K. Rowling, his daughter Alice regarded it as “probably one of the finest books an 8/9 year old could read.”
- After captivating the hearts and imaginations of youngsters all across the world, it is now one of the best-selling novels of all time.
“I gave it to Alice who took it upstairs… We had the chapters up to Diagon Alley at that stage,” Newton told Reuters.
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“She kind of floated down the stairs an hour later saying: ‘Dad, this book is better than anything you’ve shown me’.”
Sunday marks 25 years since Rowling’s first book about the magical world of witches and wizards was published.
Rowling had endured rejection until Bloomsbury accepted her writing with a 2,500-pound advance. Her narrative went on to become a worldwide sensation, generating a slew of books and a large film franchise.
“Did we know that it would sell over 500 million copies by the summer of 2022? No, but we did know that it was a great piece of writing,” Newton said.
“It was children and not their parents who were the original adopters of this book. It was a complete grassroots phenomenon.”
Those kids would stand in line for hours in front of bookstores for the next instalments of Harry’s adventures, which concluded in 2007 with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”
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It also helped some people, such as Jacqueline Hulbert, now 23, like reading.
“It was just phenomenal. It was nothing like I had tried to read before because the story was gripping enough that I wanted to keep trying to read it,” Hulbert said.