Oddly enough, until 25 years ago no one had heard of an orphan named Harry Potter, or a Hogwarts school of wizardry, or a hidden platform 9 and 3/4 in London’s King’s Cross station. Nobody except the novelist JK Rowling and its publishers from the Bloomsbury house, which on June 26, 1997 published the first book of the already famous literary series: harry potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
In this quarter of a century, the magical universe of “the boy who survived” Voldemort has taken root in the imagination of several generations who wished to receive, one day, the letter of admission to Hogwarts and be able to study subjects such as Potions, Defense Against the Dark Arts or Charms, with a wand made of phoenix feathers like the protagonist’s.
To this day, there are still children and adolescents who grow up with the desire to find those sealed letters with green ink and who look out of the Minalima store, in London, in the central neighborhood of Soho, to see that and other designs that they devised Miraphora Mina and Eduardo Lima for the movies.
Visit the Harry Potter shops
“For my birthday I asked to come to London to visit all the Harry Potter stores and go to the studios,” 15-year-old Lucía Jurado from Tenerife told EFE.
Along with his brother Roberto, they have had the “incredible experience” of seeing and touching the different cards that rest in the store’s fireplace. «I felt like Harry Potter in her house» -she pointed out, excited- «I will never forget it».
Design duo Minalima took it upon themselves to rip many objects from the pages and bring them to life: magic books, the Daily Prophet newspaper, candy wrappers like the chocolate jumping frog, and even train tickets from the Hogwarts Express. “We feel very special to have started Harry on this incredible journey,” Lima told EFE.
JK Rowling provides a “minimal description” of the objects in her books, Mina said, but enough to feed the imagination and give designers “a little gift” who have had plenty of wiggle room. “For example, the Marauder’s Map describes it as just a square piece of parchment that falls apart,” she noted.
The manuscript, continuously rejected
25 years ago, Alice Newton was eight years old and was one of the first readers to escape our ordinary world, that of Muggles according to the saga, to immerse herself in the story of an orphan with a strange scar on his forehead who has to live with his cruel uncles and sleeping in the cupboard under the stairs.
As she began to read, Alice was fascinated by the first chapters left to her by her father, Nigel Newton, founder of Bloomsbury Publishing, and his opinion was decisive so that the manuscript did not end up in yet another rejection of publication.
And it is that before Alice, a dozen publishers had rejected JK Rowling, Joanne Rowling’s pseudonym, and the manuscript she had begun writing in a rented room in south London, while carrying the stigma of being a single mother and surviving. thanks to social aid, without knowing that he would end up hoarding more than 850 million pounds (989 million euros).
Far from the popular belief that the gothic Lello bookstore in Porto was the birthplace of the adventures of Harry Potter and his friends, Ron and Hermione, the same novelist has revealed that, in fact, it was a London apartment near Clapham station Junction, at 94 St John’s Road, where he put “pen to paper for the first time” and laid “the first bricks of Hogwarts”.
So, despite the long queues of fans that pile up every day in the Porto bookstore, there Rowling did not write a word of the 77,689 that the first novel has. “I never knew of its existence! It’s beautiful and I wish I had visited it, but it has nothing to do with Hogwarts! “He confessed on Twitter, although he did live for two years in the Portuguese city, full of university students dressed in black capes -la praxe- that so much resembles the Hogwarts uniform.
