Guarding the Potter Secrets in Crawfordsville
by Claire Kirch -- Publishers Weekly, 7/5/2007 8:08:00 AM
As July 21 approaches, Scholastic, the U.S. publisher of the eagerly anticipated last volume in the Harry Potter series, is maintaining tight security around the 12 million copies now being manufactured at undisclosed locations and being shipped to retailers over the next few weeks. While Scholastic has refused to divulge where the books are being produced, two reliable sources in Crawfordsville, Ind., a rural community of 15,243 residents 50 miles west of Indianapolis, have confirmed that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is being manufactured at the R.R. Donnelley plant there. With approximately 1,500 employees, the plant, one of 25 Donnelley manufacturing centers in this country, is Crawfordsville's largest employer.
“HP books are being printed right here in itty-bitty Crawfordsville,” a local resident, who requested anonymity, reported. “We've been hearing midnight trains on that seldom-used track to Donnelley's for weeks now. That's really the giveaway: middle-of-the-night freight trains on a track that rarely gets used. This is just like last time.”
“There's weird security here, with the employees,” she added, before referring PW to another local source, a woman with several relatives and friends, employed at both Donnelley's North Plant and South Plant. While this woman, who also requested anonymity, indicated that, to her knowledge, employees have not been required to sign nondisclosure agreements, she described thorough lunch box searches at the end of each work day and a ban on all cellphones at the plant for the duration of the project, identified as “MLK” by all Donnelley personnel.
“They wrap up the books in black cellophane and keep them in a secured storage area. There are garage doors in some of the rooms, blocking them off. You can only go through if you have a garage door opener,” she said.
Donnelley employees—in Crawfordsville, at least—have been promised complimentary copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but not until August.
When a call was made to the Crawfordsville production plant to inquire what security measures, besides lunch box searches and cellphone bans, are being taken to safeguard the MLK project, a Donnelley security representative responded, “I can't discuss that,” and hung up.
Doug Fitzgerald, Donnelley's senior v-p of marketing and communications at the company's corporate headquarters in Chicago, would neither confirm nor deny that Donnelley was manufacturing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in Crawfordsville or at any of Donnelley's other facilities, either here or abroad. “Any comments regarding books being printed by R.R. Donnelley must be directed to the publishers,” Fitzgerald insisted.
Kyle Good, Scholastic's v-p of corporate communications, initially declined comment to an e-mail sent her in the late afternoon July 3 that asked if she'd care to comment on security at the Donnelley plant in Crawfordsville. That evening, however, Good called this correspondent, wanting to know if PW had obtained this information from Donnelley. When she was told that nobody employed by Donnelley had spoken to PW, and that a Crawfordsville employee had even hung up the telephone when an inquiry was made, she wished this correspondent a happy Fourth of July.
