A scene from last night's line at Barnes and Noble
I had reserved my copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on Monday, after some minor panic that it was being released on Tuesday and the realization that the closer Border's had raised the reserved price to only 30 percent off, but I hadn't thought until reading my friend's list that I'd still need to get there early to pick up a wristband if I wanted to pick it up on Friday night. So I got to Barnes and Noble about ten, netting myself a wristband saving me the seventy-seventh spot in line, and went off to run some errands. (Barnes and Noble would run with such efficiency -- they had prebagged all the books -- that I would be out of there nine minutes after the cash registers had opened, although I would try to toss a spanner into the works by also purchasing the new James Crumley and making them look up a phone number for the Preferred Reader's discount.)
Seventy-fifth and sixth in line were an intellectual boy of somewhere between eleven and thirteen, who fit my mental image of Harry Potter a little more tightly than does Daniel Radcliffe, and his younger sister, eight or nine or ten years old, I don't know. As the line snaked past a display stand of ancillary materials -- Harry Potter puzzles, or candies, or eau de toilette -- the girl asked about the artwork on the stand. "What's that Harry's behind?" she inquired, pointing to the stone-colored wizard figure. "I don't know," said her brother. "I think it's a gargoyle." The girl then wanted to know what a gargoyle was, leading her brother to some difficulty in explaining. "You mean like Dobby?" "No, it's made out of stone and it's on old buildings." His sister obviously had no referrent for this.
It was about ten years ago that my hippest New York friend was showing off the gargoyles she had bought from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts catalogue, so I figured it was about time that the trend had trickled down to Woodmere, Ohio. I looked around: we were surrounded by the usual impulse kitsch which clots the checkout lines of big box bookstores. I saw a spinner rack of calendars; their subjects the epitomes of cute or cutely spiritual I had expected. Kittens, puppies, horses, Monet, angels, castles. At the bottom of the rack on its fourth turn I found it, the 2006 Gargoyles Mini Wall Calendar. I tapped the boy on his shoulder and handed it to him, mumbling something about showing his sister.
He gave it a perturbed glance and looked around for help. After half a minute the woman who was number seventy-four took it from him and deposited it on the remainders table.
Seventy-fifth and sixth in line were an intellectual boy of somewhere between eleven and thirteen, who fit my mental image of Harry Potter a little more tightly than does Daniel Radcliffe, and his younger sister, eight or nine or ten years old, I don't know. As the line snaked past a display stand of ancillary materials -- Harry Potter puzzles, or candies, or eau de toilette -- the girl asked about the artwork on the stand. "What's that Harry's behind?" she inquired, pointing to the stone-colored wizard figure. "I don't know," said her brother. "I think it's a gargoyle." The girl then wanted to know what a gargoyle was, leading her brother to some difficulty in explaining. "You mean like Dobby?" "No, it's made out of stone and it's on old buildings." His sister obviously had no referrent for this.
It was about ten years ago that my hippest New York friend was showing off the gargoyles she had bought from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts catalogue, so I figured it was about time that the trend had trickled down to Woodmere, Ohio. I looked around: we were surrounded by the usual impulse kitsch which clots the checkout lines of big box bookstores. I saw a spinner rack of calendars; their subjects the epitomes of cute or cutely spiritual I had expected. Kittens, puppies, horses, Monet, angels, castles. At the bottom of the rack on its fourth turn I found it, the 2006 Gargoyles Mini Wall Calendar. I tapped the boy on his shoulder and handed it to him, mumbling something about showing his sister.
He gave it a perturbed glance and looked around for help. After half a minute the woman who was number seventy-four took it from him and deposited it on the remainders table.