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Sunday, June 22, 2003

Card-Toting Muggles Love Harry More Than Hillary

By Leanne Potts
Of the Journal
    Assistant library director Kirsten Shields said the library ordered 440 copies of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" as well as 40 audiobook versions.
    That's the most copies of a new book the 17-branch system has ever ordered, Shields said.
    The library ordered just 40 copies of Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoir "Living History," Shields said, and no audiobooks. That's one-eleventh the number of Potter books.
    The library bases its order sizes on the number of people who put the title on hold, she said. The longer the waiting list, the more they order.
    Mid-week, 162 people were waiting for the former first lady's book, which debuted two weeks ago at the top of The New York Times best-seller list.
    There were 960 names on the list for the Potter book, released Saturday.
    "Everybody has been waiting on that book," Shields said in the understatement of the hour.
    For those of you who have been disco-dancing in a cave since the Carter administration, the new Potter book is the most anticipated in publishing history.
    The book's publisher has printed more than 8 million copies of the 892-page tome.
    On Friday, millions of kids (and yes, adults) dressed in Potter-themed costumes stayed up till the wee hours so they could go to a bookstore and buy "Order of the Phoenix" the nanosecond it went on sale.
    Apparently boy wizards have a much higher pop culture quotient than former first ladies — at least among people who use their library cards.
    DOWN TO ONE: A few weeks ago I wrote about a local band called Unverified that is on a compilation CD released by radio station trade magazine CMJ. The disc, "Certain Damage No. 130," went to 4,000 U.S. radio stations in May.
    Unverified member Scott Warmuth now says Unverified isn't a trio, as he originally claimed, but consists of just him.
    On his Web site Thursday he said Unverified is a conceptual art project he put together earlier this year to demonstrate something, I'm not sure what, about the music business and the media.
    Hmmm. He told me last month Unverified was a three-man garage band that had been together since 2000.
    Conceptual art and garage bands are the definition of off-the-grid — neither requires a business license or leaves a paper trail.
    A CMJ staffer said Thursday the magazine didn't know and didn't care how many people were in Unverified, or how long the act had been around. It put the single "Red Light Green Light 1 2 3" on its disc because it was amused by the gimmicky way the act came to the magazine's attention, and because it liked the song.
   

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    Leanne Potts can be reached at lpotts@abqjournal.com.