Harry Potter sells out

Here's my transparent ploy for topicality: a post about Harry Potter. I was travelling on Saturday morning and seemed to see people everywhere clutching the new volume. As I passed my local bookstore - all done out with Potter-themed curtains and faux-gothic front - I overheard a harassed mother with two kids in tow wailing "They've sold out!" At the risk of making myself even more unpopular, I have to confess to being one of those people who is depressed by the sight of an adult reading a Harry Potter book. Should I go further and say how surprised I am to see many librarians reading Harry Potter?

When I was a child, I read as a child, but I wanted to grow up and read grown up books. I thought my older brother's copy of To Kill a Mockingbird was a fascinating object, and, in typical fraternal spite, he hid it from me in a pile of old washing that sat on the defunct copper* in our washhouse. (This pile of washing, though perfectly clean, was never disturbed by my mother, and seemed to have no real function in our household.) It was a good place to hide a book, but not good enough. I found Mockingbird, and read it over a period of days, in short standing snatches, when my brother was out of the way. This was probably the most intense reading experience of my life.

So to see people reading Harry Potter when they could be reading D. H. Lawrence or Henry James or Vladimir Nabokov or Anthony Burgess seems to me almost a treason against one of the few compensations we have for leaving childhood behind.

The Potter phenomenon reminds me of one of my favourite childhood books, John Masefield's The Midnight Folk, similarly a tale of a young boy's adventure in a world of magic, written long before J. K. Rowling was even a single mother. I recently found and bought a copy, hoping to revisit this world, but funnily enough it has sat on my shelf for nearly a year now, and its prospects of being read seem slim.

(Incidentally, here's an interesting article on the economics of the world of Harry Potter. )

*note for younger readers: a 'copper' was a large copper basin heated by a wood fire, in which the hot water for the laundry was prepared, back in the ye olde dayes.

Update: Huginn, who seems never to sleep, and who has more eyes than Argus, defends the Potter-readers, bringing no less a witness than C. S. Lewis. In my own defence, I can only plead the virtue of inconsistency. I did mention buying The Midnight Folk, with the intention of revisiting it as an adult. Some of my real cultural treasures are things that fall into that area of works created by adults for adults, over the heads of children - such as Looney Tunes cartoons, and the Donald Duck comics of Carl Barks. My concerns about the Harry Potter books go to a question I am unable to answer (not having read them), and have seldom if ever heard raised: are they any good as literature? To put it another way: how do the Potter books compare as literature to the Narnia books? Put yet another way, if the first Potter book had been released as a book for adult readers, would it have succeeded?