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Harry Potter: The Magic Is in the Details
With fans eager to catch an error, Cheryl Klein is the queen of Potter details.
July 20, 2007 — -- Cheryl Klein is a Harry Potter fan, a very big Harry Potter fan. She even has her own Harry Potter eyeglasses.
"These are my glasses for the first Harry Potter release party I ever attended, before I started working for [U.S. Potter publisher] Arthur Levine," Klein says. "Back when I had just graduated from college, in the year 2000."
But Klein isn't just a fan. She holds one of the most important jobs there is, in Potterian terms.
"We call it continuity editing … trying to keep the continuity of J.K. Rowling's world together and making sure that everything is consistent and all the details are right," she explains.
Ah, the details. That's what Harry Potter fans live for, of course. And given that a lot of them read these books again and again and again, well … it had to happen. They started spotting the little mistakes, which get collected, of course, on the Internet -- mistakes like an illustration portraying the wizard Dumbledore with a normal right hand, when the book describes his right hand and arm as blackened and shriveled.
"They're so enthusiastic," says Klein. "I mean, we get things like this and we're like, 'Oh, shoot, we missed that?' You know? But it reflects so much genuine love for the books."
Which is why Klein takes these error-finding readers so seriously, writing back when she gets a letter like one from a 10-year-old named Chelsea, who asked, "Was I the first person to find the mistake on page 283, paragraph four, in Harry Potter II?"
Klein says she can understand why people seem to delight in finding mistakes.
"They feel like they're part of the world," she says. "They feel like they've made their contribution to it in some way. If they can even just send us one little correction, something like that. And the letters we write back, to the kids especially, always say, 'Good for you,' you know. 'You caught something.'"
Well, Klein says it's for the kids, but then there's the likes of grown-up Potter fan Melissa Anelli, webmaster of the Potterian Web site TheLeakyCaudron.org … and cataloger of errors.
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