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Arthur Levine |
Scholastic News Online talks with Harry Potter editor Arthur Levine about the much-anticipated release of
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Levine's publishing imprint, Arthur A. Levine Books, has been a part of Scholastic for seven years. Other books he has published are:
The Firework-Maker's Daughter and Clockwork, by Philip Pullman;
A Hive for the Honeybee, by Sionbhe Lally; and
Samir and Yonatan, a Hebrew novel by Daniella Carmi, translated by Yael Lotan. He is especially excited about a new book coming out this summer called
The Slightly True Story of Cedar B. Hartley, by Martine Murray.
"This is a book I love so much I want to run around and press it into everyone's hand," Levine said.
To find out how Levine became the U.S. editor of the Harry Potter series and what his job entails, read our interview below.
Q: Explain your job as an editor and how you do it?
Arthur Levine: Well, my lucky job as the editor is to be the first reader and also, I try to be what I call the "ideal reader." An ideal reader is somebody who reacts as any reader would, but with a great deal of sympathy and understanding for the author immediately.
My first job is to tell Jo [J.K. Rowling] what I was thinking or feeling the whole way through the book. It is my job with any author to say, "Well, this is the first point at which my mind kind of wandered, maybe this section is too long."
The next phase, and this is particularly complicated with the Harry Potter books, is to make sure that things are consistent from book to book. For that I have the help of my assistant editor, Cheryl Klein, and my managing editor, Manuela Soares, and a couple of very good copy editors as well.
So, we all pore through the final manuscript and make sure that every time a spell is made it's made in the same way, and every time somebody's title at the Ministry of Magic comes up, that it's the same title. We make sure it's right. We keep a very detailed list of these things and we check and make sure things are consistent from book to book and also consistent within a book. There are a lot of things that bring a book from its twinkle in my eye to the book on the shelf that somebody can take out from the library or buy in a bookstore, or buy from a book club.
Q: When you're looking for a book, how do you know when you've found a real gem like Harry Potter?
Arthur Levine: It's a gut feeling. It's how the book affects me emotionally. And usually that's done through the characters. If there's one thing that's probably consistent among all the books I've published, it's that there's a character or characters in the book that you care about. And if you really deeply care about a character and their story, then that means that you want to keep reading the book. And if, at the end of the book, you feel like you've gone through a journey with that character, then the book has really affected you. That's what I look for when I'm reading.
Q: How did you discover Harry Potter?
Arthur Levine: I discovered Harry Potter at the Bologna Book Fair, which is an international book fair in Bologna, Italy, that I go to every year. This was 1997, and I was setting up my imprint, Arthur A. Levine Books, and visiting all of my colleagues at publishers around the world because that's what you do at a book fair. The Bologna fair is where international publishers from all around the world get together to talk to each other about the books on their list, and they get to share.
I was visiting Bloomsbury, a publisher I admire a lot; they have a wonderful list. They asked me what I was looking for and I said, "Well, you know, what I'm really looking for is a book that people will talk about 20 years down the road and say, 'Wow, that was my favorite book!'"
She said, "Well, I think we have one book like that, and it's a new author, she's never been published before, but she's got a great imagination and we're all really, really enthusiastic about her. Actually we don't even have the rights to sell it to you, but you can contact the agent, and here's a set of galleys." Galleys are the early stage of a book—it's typeset, but it's not printed yet. So I took it and I read it on the plane home from Bologna, and thought it was fabulous and really fun. I thought, "This is a really great writer. This is exactly what I'm looking for. I think this book is going to be around for a long time." And that was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
Q: At that time, were there plans to make it a series?
Arthur Levine: Yeah, Jo always knew that she was going to write seven books, one for each year that Harry's at school. She knew that from the start, and I think she also had a pretty good idea of what generally would happen in each year, although I think she works out the specifics as she's writing. She doesn't know every detail on every page, but she knows a fair amount of detail.
Q: One kid was quoted in a story about Harry Potter as saying that Harry was his best fictional friend and that he seems like somebody that you actually know.
Arthur Levine: You know, what I like about Harry is that he is flawed, that he feels real because he's not perfect. He values a lot of the things that I value, like he values his friends very much, and he has a great deal of love in him. You know, I think that I personally feel for him for not having had parents; for having parents who loved him very much but whom he could never know. I've always sympathized and empathized with him, and he's found other people in his life to fulfill those roles, like Sirius Black and the Weasleys. There's a lot of things that he's gone through that I can relate to. When he first went to Hogwarts, you know, going to a new school and not knowing anyone, never having known that he was a wizard. He's discovering things about himself that he didn't know he could. I think that's a human condition. I think that's what makes you relate to him. I feel like in a lot of ways that I am Harry's best friend, too.
Q: What are the differences between the British version and the American version?
Arthur Levine: Well, one of the major differences is that we've paid a lot more attention to book design. Our books have chapter opening illustrations, whereas the British editions don't. Ours have had traditionally more leading, which is the space between the lines, and if you look at the page—this is just my personal opinion—but I think ours are easier to look at and more comfortable to read. We have really fine paper quality, and wonderful three-piece binding with cloth. We just have lavished, even from the very beginning, even before it was a famous property, a lot of attention on creating the exact feeling that we wanted, down to each of the characters who writes a note in these books having his or her own signature. We have asked different people who worked on the books to write these signatures. J.K. Rowling herself has signed one of the characters. I've signed one of the characters. We have a lot of wonderful details like that.
I think in the beginning I was very concerned that readers who are experiencing the world of Hogwarts for the first time would be able to distinguish between the invented language that Jo was using and British slang, so there was some translation going on. A good example is in Quidditch; a word that Jo uses a lot is "pitch." Now, when we were introducing the sport to American kids, it was a little confusing to use "pitch" as Jo used it, which was a synonym for "field." The Quidditch "pitch" is the Quidditch "field." Now, I felt like that was a lot to throw at readers when they're already trying to imagine a game that is a combination between soccer and basketball and baseball where "pitch" means something different. As the books have gone on, it's been clearer and clearer to people what's British and what's magical. I also feel that with the help of the movies, there are fewer and fewer words that need to be translated to be understood. In any case, there's always very little of that, so at this point the books are virtually identical. We edit them together. I work with a British editor Emma Matthewson on each stage of the editing.
Q: You mentioned the books that you liked as a child. What are some of your all-time favorite children's books?
Arthur Levine: You know, any conversation would probably bring up a different group of books, but I particularly loved Russell Hoban's books about Frances the Badger, you know, Bedtime for Frances, Bread and Jam for Frances. I loved Harry the Dirty Dog and The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge. I particularly loved any book that had a little character, an underdog, having a big impact. I think that's how all kids feel, and certainly that's how I felt as the youngest of three brothers. I loved Michael Bond's Paddington books, and Roald Dahl. I loved, as a child, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And Winnie the Pooh. All of A.A. Milne's books of poetry and all his books about Pooh. I'm a big Pooh fan! And then, onward, Ursula Le Guin, Tolkien, and now Harry Potter.
Q: Where did you get your love of reading?
Arthur Levine: My mom was an elementary school teacher as well as an artist, so I know I got a lot of it from her. My aunt taught me how to read very early and always encouraged reading. You know, everybody in my house always read. In the evenings you'd have my father, he usually read magazines, and my mother and my brothers reading in the living room, that's not an uncommon occurrence. We always had newspapers around, and books, and I was one of those people in that family reading, so it definitely came from my family.
Q: Do you think that you will find another Harry Potter?
Arthur Levine: I think that I'll find many books that are wonderful and imaginative and original and, you know, I hope that there will be many that will be classics and will be exactly that kind of book that I just said to you, "Yes, I love this book, it was important to me, it changed my life." I hope that there will be many of those books.
—Interview by Marie Morreale
