Booksellers Help Harry Potter

Poor Harry Potter. As if it weren't hard enough to grow up surrounded by Muggles, those same Muggles have been busy trying to get his books out of the classroom and off of library shelves. According to Beverley Becker, associate director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, "Harry Potter is still the most frequently challenged book around, starting in 1999." She expects it to top the challenged charts again in 2003.

To help the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), one of the bookseller organizations that has been instrumental in trying to keep the Harry Potter books where they belong, Cammie Mannino, owner of Halfway Down the Stairs in Rochester, Mich., is encouraging booksellers to donate part of the proceeds from the sales of the new book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, to ABFFE. "If you haven't already come up with a plan to promote Harry sales, please give ABFFE another thought. They do a lot of wonderful work and could really use any donations you can make," she wrote recently on the Association of Booksellers for Children (ABC) listserver. "We're giving 20% of the first month's sales to ABFFE, which means about $6 a book," Mannino told PW. Although Mannino knows she can't compete with the much higher discounts given at the chains and many online retailers, she has gotten a lot of good feedback since she began publicizing the donation in her store newsletter. "One customer said to me, 'You're reserving Harry Potter and you're giving it to that group. I'll get it from you.' That's who are customers are, good people with values," says Mannino.

Betsey Detwiler, owner of Buttonwood Books & Toys in Cohasset, Mass., was one of the first to follow Mannino's lead. "When I saw Cammie's letter, I thought: 'Boy. That's really great,' " she says. Since many of Detwiler's staff want to donate a part of the June sales to local schools, which have been hard hit in Massachusetts, she worked out a compromise. Customers can choose whether they want 20% of the purchase price to go to the schools or to ABFFE.

What convinced Mannino and Detwiler to support ABFFE and Harry Potter in this way is an unusual case that got little attention outside of the state Arkansas, where it was filed last summer in U.S. District Court. It began when the Cedarville, Ark., School Board overrode a unanimous vote of the Library Committee and practiced a different sort of magic, trying to make the Harry Potter books disappear from its school shelves. As a result, Cedarville school libraries weren't allowed to display Harry Potter books openly for most of the 2002-03 school year and students were required to have written permission from their parents to read them.

Library Committee member Billy Ray Counts and his wife, Mary Nell Counts, sued the Cedarville School District on behalf of their daughter, Dakota. Then in early March, they filed a motion for summary judgment to stop what they regarded as an ongoing violation of the First Amendment. ABFFE, ABC, the Association of American Publishers, PEN American Center, writer Judy Blume, and ten 10 other organizations filed a brief of amici curae in support. The 18-page brief notes: "Cases like this one, involving the censorship of a critically acclaimed book credited with motivating thousands of children to read, are particularly egregious."

"This is the first court challenge to an effort to censor Harry Potter," noted ABFFE president Chris Finan. Given Judge Jimm Hendren's recent ruling in favor of the Countses and the school board's decision not to appeal, Finan said, "We're obviously delighted by the results. We hope that it will make other school boards think twice before doing the same thing. On the other hand, it is unlikely. The same kind of religious concerns that motivated the protestors aren't going to go away. We expect a spate of protests in the coming months when the new book is released."