| Joanne Rowling first had the idea for Harry Potter whilst travelling on a train from Manchester to London back in 1990. He simply walked into her head fully formed and she knew automatically that he was a boy who had not known that he was a wizard going off to a wizard's school. She finished the book around 1995 but it was a further year before anyone bought it. Harry was supposedly turned down by around ten to twelve publishers for reasons such as it was thought to be too long, it was a boarding school novel (which was out of fashion), and it was not commercial enough. Finally, in 1996, Bloomsbury Press purchased it for an advance of just £2,500, and the book finally hit the shelves on June 26th, 1997. The original print run was only 500 copies and consequently first editions today are very valuable, some reaching bids of thousands of pounds in auction. Harry became popular almost entirely though word of mouth and good reviews. The media hype didn't come until later when the book's popularity had already taken off and journalists began to marval at it. The book went on to be published in around 200 countries, almost always under the title The Philosopher's Stone. The two exceptions were the United States and France. The US publisher Scholastic, who bought the rights in 1997 for an incredible advance of $100,000, changed the title to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Many reasons for this were circulated by the press but the most common version is that they didn't think that the word 'philosopher' would be associated with magic. France might have thought the same, as they called the book Harry Potter a l'ecole des Sorciers (Harry Potter at Wizard's School). The film version made by Warner Bros. and Heyday Productions was released in 2001. |
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