Know what a bibliography is? Just in case you don’t, it’s essentially a carefully cataloged history of a single book, several books, or an author’s entire canon. You should care about this because J.K Rowling: A Bibliography 1997-2013 was just published, and it chronicles the creation and execution of Rowling’s entire Harry Potter book series.
Like any long-term creative project, the writing, editing, and publishing of all seven books was no easy task. In fact, according to The Guardian, Rowling was especially not fond of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban:
“Finally! I’ve read this book so much I’m sick of it, I never read either of the others over and over again when editing them, but I really had to this time,” writes Rowling in an undated letter to her editor Emma Matthewson about the Prisoner of Azkaban, quoted by Errington in his book. “If you think it needs more work, I’m willing and able, but I do think this draft represents an improvement on the first; the dementors are much more of a presence this time round, I think,” she adds.
Matthewson replies in August 1998, calling it “just great Jo – quite a huge, teetering tottering plot that never quite falls down! What a feat!” But the edits clearly continued, with Rowling writing to her editor in November that year: “An annoying little speech bubble has just popped onto my screen saying ‘looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like some help?’ This laptop is too clever for its own good … I am so sick of re-reading this one that I’ll be hard put to smile when it comes to doing public readings from it. But perhaps the feeling will have worn off by next summer… ”
Of course, not everything behind the scenes was this stressful — at least for Rowling. As the book series and films grew more and more popular, more editors and staff came on board to assist the author with her monumental task. This sometimes meant less stress for her and more stress for people like Bloomsbury chief executive Nigel Newton and Rowling’s then-agent Christopher Little:
Little summoned Newton to The Pelican pub in Fulham for a drink, he told Errington – Newton knew the meeting could be significant, as the location was where Little had delivered the previous book to Bloomsbury. “So I drove to The Pelican, a pub off the Fulham Road not far from Stamford Bridge, in a state of high alert. And I went in and there was a massive Sainsbury’s plastic carrier bag at this feet … he said nothing about that and I said nothing and he just said ‘Drink?’ and I said, ‘a pint, please’. So we stood at the bar and drank our pints and said nothing about Harry Potter. But when we left I walked out with the carrier bag. It was a classic dead letter drop,” said Newton.
Painstakingly compiled by Philip Errington over the course of five years, the bibliography dives deep into the history of the series and all the effort required to make it happen. It’s not quite a new book from Rowling, or another lost bit from the Harry Potter narrative, but dead drops in a pub? I’m in.
(Via The Guardian)