Andrea Immel

J. K. Rowling is the only major fantasy English-language fantasy writer to have completely saturated the market with merchandise described in her books: her imagination is naturally commodifying. Diana Wynne Jones wrote more books revolving around magical powers, but the plots and characters are not contained in one world. There are seven volumes by Ursula K. Le Guin about the great archipelago of Earthsea, where wizards and ordinary people live frugally without the assistance of technology or pleasures of many creature comforts. Things are central to the imaginative realm of Rowling in a way they never were in those of Wynne Jones and Le Guin. Say “Harry Potter” and chances are a product she dreamed up as likely to pop into your head; there is no comparable reaction when hearing “Chrestomanci” or “Sparrowhawk.”

Only those immersed in the Harry Potter series as youngsters will put on their bucket list a visit to Platform 9 ¾, the flagship of official licensed Harry Potter shops in King’s Cross Station. Somewhere among the wizarding world collectibles for Muggles may be found for that petite madeleine—or rather Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavour Beans—that will keep the memories ever green of reading the books, listening to the audio-recordings, and watching the films. A jar of Bobotuber pus cannot be had there for love or money, but there is more than enough swag to cram full an expandable bag. A set of Horcruxes? An LGBT pride tee shirt? A Divination tea set? A Gringotts bank? A Final Challenge chess set? What will you have?It’s even possible to imagine Rowling’s characters visiting Platform 9 ¾ as a shadowy simulacrum of Diagon Alley. Draco would stalk down the aisles looking for merch from the dark side— the Death Eaters’ masks or the movie prop replica of his wand authenticated by Warner Brothers in an Ollivander’s box plus a Slytherin wand stand—that might stir his pure blood and uncurl his lip very slightly.

Ron would deny the existence of knock-offs of his mother’s infamous Christmas sweaters. Being chronically short of pocket money, he would have to be contented with picking up some cheap Quidditch memorabilia or trying to complete his set of chocolate frog wizard cards.There isn’t anything quirky enough in the shop to catch Luna’s eye. If witches used mobile phones, she could search Etsy for unique items like customized cake decorations, a polymer clay statue of Dobby and the sock that liberated him, or a full-scale model of Harry’s cupboard while waiting for her friends to finish browsing. The attempts to copy her personal style, on the other hand, she might not take as a compliment, even if the prices were reasonable.What about Hermione? It’s hard to imagine her wearing a charm bracelet with miniatures of the winged key or the Tri-wizard Tournament cup. But the best witch of her generation can’t resist a good reference book, so she might just not be able to resist a copy of the Unofficial Harry Potter Character Compendium compiled by Mugglenet bound in “premium leather accented in true 22K gold” from Easton Press for $147.00 (payment in three convenient installments is also an option). And her preference for books is, surprisingly enough, the soundest in terms of investment value. The books that started the tsunami of authorized merchandise, have held their value relative to the tchotchkes: thousands of dollars separate the priciest lots of merch on EBay from the seven titles in the series. Buying a first edition of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on Ebay would be foolhardy, given the very brief descriptions posted there, but armed with Phillip W. Errington’s updated edition of J. K. Rowling: A Bibliography (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), I can examine any copy at hand and be confident of identifying one of the several million copies of the first printing of the American edition. In fact, there’s one in my basement, but it’s been handled too much to realize full market value. Pity.

Errington succeeds in bestowing upon Rowling’s body of writing literary legitimacy, but fails to give any indication of the existence of the parallel collecting universe she has authorized to extend the wizarding world’s reach far beyond the printed page. Legions of devout fans haunt Ebay for Harry Potter memorabilia because it’s affordable. It can be bought in lots sold by weight or acquired painstakingly item by item. For a Hagrid completist, it would be necessary to track down all forms of Fang, Fluffy, Norbert, Buckbeak, Blast-ended skrewts, Aragog, etc. Having gone that far down the path to the Forbidden Forest, the passionate collector would then be obligated to add all the different versions of his hut (that’s a lot of Legos) and the peculiar objects inspired by the birthday cake he baked for Harry…. All this activity raises the dementors of storage versus display–and either option eats up space and tests the forbearance of loved ones. It has even wider ramifications. Best-selling books may be the heart and soul of any campaign to exploit their commercial potential as a beloved cultural property, but overlooking all the merch (however sane a decision it may be on the bibliographer’s part) fails to come to terms with the cataclysmic changes marketing and branding have wrought in the literary landscape of late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. To understand the impact of Rowling’s imagination, it is important to take into account her fans’ powerful desire to acquire solid, displayable, wearable tokens of the wizarding world.

Read the two articles below for different takes on collecting Harry Potter:

https://hobbyhelp.com/harry-potter-collecting/

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/harry-potter-inc-how-the-boy-wizard-created-a-21-billion-business/241948/

In 1945 Eric Gillett published an unfinished manuscript of memoirs by Elizabeth Ham (1783-1859), the daughter of a yeoman, under the title Elizabeth Ham by Herself 1783-1820. Gillett said somewhat condescendingly that the vivid account of the woman’s experiences was appealing because of “her struggles to make a life of her own, to be of use to someone. Without training or business ability, but with educational and literary gifts above the average, ….and desperately conscious of her gentility, she was badly handicapped from the beginning.”

Ham made this all too clear in the stories she told on the mistresses of the dame and boarding schools she attended. This horribly comic one underlines best just how irregular the quality of discipline and instruction for girls could be during this period:

The great punishment was to have a bow of black ribbon pinned on the sleeve. I remember having a great dread of the “black knot,” and having one morning incurred the punishment, roared out most lustily. As ill luck would have it, my cousin was strolling near and hearing the outcries of her darling, rushed in to the rescue. She caught me under the arms to bear me away, but Aunt Sukey’s authority was not to be so condemned, she seized me by the heels whilst my cousin kept fast hold of my shoulders. I really though I should be pulled to pieces between them. I well remember the enflamed visages of the ladies as they tugged at me. Their passion frightened me more than the black knot had done.”

It is to Elizabeth Ham’s credit that in spite of experiences like these (or perhaps because of them), she succeeded in composing an instructive poem for children that was informative, imaginative, and infused with gaiety: The Infant’s Grammar, or A Pic-nic Party of the Parts of Speech (1824). She may have been familiar with the poems Donelle Ruwe has called “papillionades.” They describe different kingdoms of creatures trying to outdo the others with splendid entertainments, which would so delight readers that they would be tricked into learning something about the range, classification, and character of the various costumed animals from the way they made their entrances, danced, and behaved at the midnight supper. Famous examples are William Roscoe’s The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast (1806), or Catherine Ann Dorset’s 1807 companion pieces, The Peacock at Home and The Lion’s Masquerade,Ham’s sociable parts of speech, who are not competing with rival concepts, throw a “pic-nic,” which then referred to what we would call a potluck, where all the guests contribute something to the feast. However, Ham says nothing about the refreshments being a communal effort. The event takes place indoors at Etymology Hall during the evening, not during the day in the open air, additional confirmation that the word’s meaning was in flux. Ham was not pleased with the liberties Harris’s illustrator (possibly Robert Branston) took here and there interpreting her verses. Probably the most notable discrepancy is he changed the season from winter to summer and time of day from night to the day. Yet the article “The” shown above bears an entirely superflous torch to light the guests way in. While Ham conceded that the illustrator had improved her original drawings in some places, she did not approve of his having costumed her characters in “fancy dress” inspired by the current vogue for Elizabethan fashion. Another addition that might have irked her was the insertion of a tragedy queen center stage between Harlequin and the graceful dancer, a complete fabrication. She appears to have been modelled upon the actress Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth, one of her most celebrated roles.Ham speculated that the anonymously published poem, for which she received nothing, sold well enough over thirty years to have made her financially independent. With a modest income, she would not have been obliged to earn her bread as a governess or housekeeper employed by a wealthy family. This could be either wishful thinking or anecdotal knowledge based on her having kept a sharp eye on the contents of booksellers’ shelves. I have found an advertisement in an 1845 novel for an edition published by Harris’s successor, Grant and Griffith, that is later than anything found by Marjorie Moon, the bibliographer of Ham’s publisher John Harris. It’s not idle speculation to imagine that the Infant’s Grammar of Ham might have been sold as a companion piece to the equally charming Punctuation Personified; or Pointing Made Easy by Mr. Stops (below to the right), which was also first issued by Harris in 1824.

She surely would have been very angry to learn that another contemporary woman writer for children, Madame Leinstein, quickly produced plagiaries of both The Infant’s Grammar and Punctuation Personified for Harris’s rivals, Dean & Munday and A. K. Newman and Co. later in 1824 to capitalize on their success. Leinstein (about whom nothing is known) dubbed her version of The Infant’s Grammar The Rudiments of Grammar and only a page-by-page comparison of the two pamphlets can establish the literary theft. In Leinstein’s text, the school mistress Miss Syntax takes her scholars to a country fair, which seems quite different from Ham’s picnic of the parts of speech. But the school’s facade and the two children in frontispiece to Leinstein have some suspicious similarities to the illustration of Etymology Hall in Ham..Is it a coincidence that Leinstein’s nouns are arrayed in Elizabethan finery and accompanied by an explanatory text very similar to Ham’s? This is probably the most blatant of a series of borrowings:Leinstein’s page on the interjection is a clumsy adaptation of one of the best sections in the Infants Grammar . Where Ham skillfully brings the party to a close with the poor housemaid looking at the mess the merry parts of speech have left behind them, Leinstein tacks on a superflous episode about Miss Syntax’s students relieving a poor girl.For Ham, who dreamed of independence, Leinstein’s imitation surely would not been flattery, had she known about it. Leinstein’s attempt to cut into her sales surely would have another bitter reminder of money she should have had. Well-a-day indeed…