Harry Potter No Longer a Best Seller
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
After 10 enviable years of sales, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books have fallen off the New York Times best-seller list for the first time. The Times Book Review’s senior editor, Dwight Garner, announced Thursday on Paper Cuts, the newspaper’s group book Web log, that the best-seller list for the May 11 issue of the book review does not include a single Harry Potter title.
“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the book that began the series, made its first appearance on the list December 27, 1998. By July 2000, the series was so thoroughly dominating the Times’s list that the newspaper’s editors introduced a new children’s best-seller list, allowing them to sequester the Potter books and make room for other titles on the fiction list. In 2004, the paper introduced a “children’s series” list, to break Rowling’s grip on the children’s list.
Translated into 65 languages, the seven Harry Potter books are among the best-selling and most widely read novels of all time. To date, 375 million copies have been sold.
