Harry Potter: The Magic Is in the 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.

'Genuine Love'

"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.'"

Finding 'Flints'

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.

"There's a character named Marcus Flint, who was supposed to have graduated after the second book, and he's back in the third book playing Quidditch," says Anelli. "And so somebody asked J.K. Rowling about it in a chat once, and she says, 'Oh, he had to repeat a year.' And so now, all those little mistakes, the fans colloquially call them 'Flints.'"

Actually, Anelli and Klein are friends now, bonded by the books. Because Klein is one of them, and because part of her job is to catch any mistakes before they get into print, her knowledge of Harry Potter world is literally encyclopedic.

How does her brain keep track of every detail, every name, every place, every gesture?

"It's an internal cataloging system, I guess," she says. "And of course, we keep copious notes as well, so every time I see, like, "The Restriction for Underage Wizardry," if it appears later as "The Restriction for Underage Sorcery," then I remember, 'Oh, that doesn't quite jibe.' And of course, I've also read the books many times now, and so I've gotten pretty familiar with all the terms in her world."

Keeping Secrets

Klein reads the books months before the reading public gets to see them, which means she has long known the secret -- how it does all turn out in the end. And at one point -- as she was flying from England to America with a manuscript for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" in her bag -- the secret almost got out.

"I get to my gate and they pull me aside for a random bag check and I start thinking, 'Oh no,'" Klein recalled. "And [the security agent] opens up my bag and she looks at the stack of paper and she says, 'Wow, you've got a big pile of paper here.' And she sort of starts running her fingers through it and I think, I'm trying to come up with some sort of lie, like it's fan fiction of something like that … And then she zipped me back up and passed the bag back to me and that was it."

But after tonight, the last secrets will be out. J.K. Rowling has said this is the end of the story of Harry Potter.

"The last one," says Klein. "It's going to be heartbreaking … for a lot of people."