J. K. Rowling has plenty to smile about as the world awaits the next book in her transcendently popular series.

Almost as soon as Barry Cunningham met J. K. Rowling in 1996, the first-time author was talking about what she wanted to do next. And next and next. Cunningham, editorial director at Bloomsbury Children's Books in London, had recently agreed to publish Rowling's initial effort, an overlong children's novel about an aspiring wizard. "At our first meeting," he recalls, "before we finished the first course in the restaurant, we had one of those conversations that you remember years later."

"How do you feel about sequels," Rowling asked Cunningham.

"When a first novelist says that to an editor," he says now, "you’re always slightly worried."

Cunningham pointed out that the first book hadn't even been published yet, but Rowling replied that she had seven books in mind. "She was obviously bursting to say it," he says. "And what convinced me that we were on the right track is that she knew what Harry was going to do every successive year of his life until he left school."

That intricacy is at the heart of what has turned into the biggest book story bridging the millennia. Rowling’s wizard Harry Potter and his elaborately complete world have become, in three short years, ubiquitous, breaking through every conceivable barrier.

One story:

In the London Underground one recent Saturday afternoon, a small boy exclaimed to his brother, "Look, it's Harry Potter," upon spying a reader (me) several decades his senior reading one of the books. We spent the next five minutes discussing the relative merits of the series' first and second books. Later, I tried to recall the last time I'd had a literary exchange with strangers on the tube, let alone junior strangers. The answer was never.

Rowling's success has turned non-readers into Harry addicts, and Potter books have taken the top three spots in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today adult bestseller lists. Forbes magazine’s Celebrity 100 list places Joanne Kathleen Rowling (thirty-five this July) as the twenty-fourth-highest celebrity earner in the world, wedged between Michael Jordan and Cher at forty million dollars earned in the past year. Around the world, her books have sold thirty million copies and have been translated into thirty-five languages. Sophisticated French students and Japanese women alike can't get enough of the budding wizard, who wasn't even on the scene until 1997. And in a world where one might say the highest form of flattery is a lawsuit, Rowling has earned that, too.

"Her great achievement is not to overdraw or overdescribe the characters," says Stephen Fry, the actor-writer-comedian and all-around Renaissance man who won the task of reading the first book when the British version went to audio. Fry was meticulous in familiarizing himself with the text. "I have to confess that I first read it to prepare for reading it aloud," he says. "So I started off paying attention to how the characters would sound. By about page three, I had forgotten all that and was having too much fun reading."

Now Rowling's fourth work, tentatively titled Harry Potter and the Doomspell Tournament, is due to be published on both sides of the Atlantic on July 8, and it's already topping charts on the advance orders alone. It promises to be one of the biggest books ever published. Not children’s books, mind you: books, period.

One has to ask: Why?

... Jamie Jauncey, children's author and chairman of the Scottish Arts Council's children's book awards, believes that the series could have been written at any time in the past sixty years, with its timeless themes of magic and good versus evil. In addition, there is its always-popular anti-adult stance, pitting the Hogwarts children against the unimaginative adult world outside. "She has done what Roald Dahl does," says Jauncey. Like the author of FANTASTIC MR. FOX and JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, Rowling never betrays in her writing any sense of being an adult writing down to children. "She steps into the children's shoes as she writes," he says. But most of all, "the story just bursts onto the page with sheer, raw imaginative power."

That’s what comes up again and again. "So imaginative." "Original." "Surprising." "Made me laugh out loud." Even Kevin Casey, the lawyer handling a recent suit filed against Rowling, which claims she's not so original after all, says his family loves the books. "Have you read them?" he asks. "They’re great."

Rowling's first three books tell the story of ten-year-old orphan Harry Potter, who lives with his dull, smug Muggle (nonmagical) relatives, the Dursleys, until he is informed he is a wizard and is whisked off to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry becomes a year older in each successive book and endures all manner of adventures alongside his chums, bookish Hermione Granger and plucky Ron Weasley, while they all learn magic. Reader after reader acknowledges that the series, deceptively simple in summary, offers a density of detail and characterization –- along with the complex balance of good and evil and darkness and wit, and the pace of the plots –- that makes it thoroughly addictive. Gavin Wallace, acting literature officer for the Scottish Arts Council, recalls the launch event for book one's Braille edition. "[Rowling] talked to all the kids," he says, and made an empathetic connection with them. "I think she really understands how their imaginations work."

BEGINNINGS

As tends to be the case with overnight successes, Rowling's own story has its fair share of hardship and hard work. Without her determination and penchant for unusual names –- such as "Hogwarts" and "Muggles" –- she might well still be temping in an office or teaching French, still scribbling down stories but reading them to an audience of just two: her daughter, Jessica, now six, and her sister, Di, thirty-three. Rowling's talent and luck, along with the encouragement and imagination of a dedicated cluster of people in London and Edinburgh, Scotland, allowed Harry Potter to end up charming the world into getting out its collective torch and reading under the bedsheets (as Harry himself is wont to do).

Christopher Little, an agent for heavyweight writers such as Simon Singh, (FERMAT'S ENIGMA) and Janet Gleeson (THE ARCANUM), was the first person outside Rowling's circle of friends and family to spot her potential, even though he'd never been involved with children's fiction before. Rowling, typically, tried Little because she liked his name, sending him the first few chapters of HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE in 1995. The typewritten pages found themselves perched on top of the pile of dozens of unsolicited manuscripts Little received most weeks.

He read her submission quickly and took only three days to take her on as a client; she was so thrilled, she read his reply eight times. Little had spoken to the new Bloomsbury Children's Book department at the 1995 Frankfurt Book Fair and knew they were looking for something special. "And Harry Potter was different," he says. Different and long. Most children's books are less than forty thousand words long; PHILOSOPHER'S STONE was at least sixty-five thousand.

Cunningham, the editorial director starting the Bloomsbury children's list, saw the manuscript when it arrived from Little in June 1996. "There it was," he says, "a complete world with everything worked out and everything working, a world you could enter into as a child and lose yourself within." Cunningham needed Rowling and Harry to cast their spell over his colleagues. So he handed over the manuscript to Rosamund de la Hey, children's marketing manager.

She, too, was gripped. "It made me laugh out loud and stay up all night reading it," she says. The next day she and a colleague spent all afternoon making copies of the manuscript, stuffing them with Smarties candies and tying a ribbon around each one. These packages were delivered to the company directors whose support would be needed to buy the book. They adored it, and Cunningham bought it the following day.

An impediment to Rowling’s sequel strategy was that, despite signing with Bloomsbury, she literally had no money. Fortunately, in early 1997 she received an 8,000 pound ($13,000) grant from the Scottish Arts Council, which considers children's fiction as important as adult literature. (Rowling's application was graded with exceptionally high marks, according to Wallace: A, A, A-, B+, A-).

Meanwhile, editorial discussions were proceeding about the first book: Should it be so long, and should it be illustrated throughout? The length of the book was reduced only slightly, finally, but Cunningham initially considered sticking with the convention of providing illustration.

"But Joanne felt from the beginning –- and I certainly after I'd chatted to her –- that everybody wanted to have their own Harry in their mind," he says. Similarly, they talked about the cover. Neither wanted an adult fantasy image, so they chose a fun children's cover. Interestingly, every country has its own look for Harry Potter. Rowling's favorite covers come from the Netherlands, where you don’t actually see Harry's face. In Britain, an additional "adult version" was released to assuage the concerns of the series' self-conscious older readers.

It was when the American audience embraced Harry Potter that the entire phenomenon went over the top. In the first weekend of British publication last summer, for instance, twenty thousand copies of book three, HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN, reportedly were imported to the States via the Internet; and in its first two weeks of official U.S. publication in fall 1999, it sold half a million copies. Overall U.S. sales for Rowling's books are now approaching twenty million -- total. Everyone, Little says, was shocked by the speed and scale of the books' success. "I thought it would be big, but not that big," he says now. "I mean, there’s never been anything bigger than this."

The Japanese story:

When Yuko Matsuoka's husband died on Christmas Day 1997, the Japanese translator inherited his small publishing house, Say-zan-sha. She had decided to continue publishing when Harry Potter arrived out of the blue. Despite being a non-native speaker of English, Matsuoka read Rowling's first book in a single night. "A wave of shock ran though my body and mind," she recalls. "And I said to myself: 'Here is something I have waited for. Here is something which must have waited for me! It is fate!'"

As a translator, Matsuoka wanted to express this feeling she had when she first read the book, so she changed as little as possible. It took fourteen months to complete, and she laughs at some of the tricky and eccentric British worlds she had to come to grips with, like "knicker-bocker glory," "stoat sandwich," "galloping gorgons," "a load of old tosh," and "codswallop." But that wasn't the half of it: Imagine trying to explain the British school system or differentiating between spells, jinxes, and other magical words for a Japanese reader. Unlike her U.S. counterparts, however, Matsuoka didn’t alter the title of the first book (which refers to the substance that, in ancient legend, converts base metals into gold). "The philospher's stone is a well-known concept among Japanese fantasy fans," she says. "So I kept the mysterious image faithfully in my translation: Kenja-no-ishi." Much of Harry Potter's success in Japan is due to the women in their twenties and thirties throughout the country who have taken the young wizard to their hearts. Calls and letters flood in every day to Matsuoka, most begging her for the second book. Matsuoka is hooked on the way the stories convey moral values such as love, friendship, and courage without sounding moralistic.

The French story:

The series' French publisher is Gallimard Jeunesse. When the company's editor in chief, Christine Baker, first received book one, she says that though she felt it was an exceptionally accomplished debut with a good mixture of ingredients, she still wavered over whether Harry Potter would charm French readers. Then Baker’s daughters convinced her he could. Nearly half a million copies of the first three books have sold in France. And now, Baker's entire family, including her husband, is obsessed with the series. Mathilde, fourteen, knows every single detail by heart, and Henriette, eighteen, far from being embarrassed, engages in passionate Potter discussions with her sophisticated classmates during their lunch breaks. (French translation duties were carried out by Roald Dahl's favorite translator, Jean-Francois Menard, in just two months. The only real challenge was explaining the British boarding school and its rituals. Gillimard did change the title of the first book to HARRY POTTER A L'ECOLE DE SORCIERS -– Harry Potter at Wizard School. After a slow start, the French media sat up and took notice once Time magazine ran a cover feature on the phenomenon.) As the series progresses, Baker points out, the plots are growing progressively darker and more complex, which seems to be exactly what readers expect and desire.

EARLY DAYS

When Fry recorded the first book in 1998, the actor says: "The madness hadn't really begun and she wasn't yet the subject of dinner-party conversation, nor had the books broken in the U.S. When I next met her [in 1999], she was better-known than the Beatles, but utterly unspoiled by it." He feels that Rowling's experiences in the United States -- from encountering one woman done up as the Fat Lady in the portrait, to the queues of kids dressed as Harry, and then the "mad religious people objecting to the books" -– had left her faintly astonished. "But she struck me as someone whose feet were on the ground."

It all seems a long way from the days when Rowling and her sister, Di, played witches and wizards with childhood friends Ian and Vikki Potter in the 1970s. Potter recalls that Rowling used to tell stories to the other kids, and is delighted to think he may have played a part in the creation of the series -- which he now reads with his own four- and eight-year-old-children.

Nearly two decades after those childhood inspirations, Rowling's early drafts about the would-be wizard took shape in daily trips to Nicolson's café in Edinburgh. She would push baby Jessica there in her buggy, then write as she sipped an espresso. Nicolson's co-owner Dougal McBride says Rowling knew the staff by name, as it was a new business back in 1994 and she was one of the first regular customers.

Today the café has been transformed into more of a restaurant, but fans -– especially those from the States –- still come to Nicolson's to pay homage, asking if they have a plaque and whether they’ll change their name to Potter's. "But we were here before Harry Potter," says McBride, who adds that Rowling, who now comes in for business lunches, doesn't seem to have changed from when he first served her. "She's as friendly and down-to-earth as she ever was."

The author clearly charms colleagues, admirers and readers alike. A Scotsman who took his children to see her at the Edinburgh Book Festival observed, "She's very slim and attractive -– sexy beast -– and I overheard other dads saying they were glad they'd come. She seems centered, edgy and highly strung; she must have a fast metabolism." Fry says, tongue slightly in cheek, that Rowling is "younger than I imagined, prettier, too. Why does one always imagine that female writers should be shortsighted, round-shouldered, ink-stained and hideous?"

So what's next? There may be ongoing drama surrounding a lawsuit filed in March that claims Rowling, Scholastic Inc., Time Warner Entertainment Co., Mattel Inc. and Hasbro Inc. have infringed on the trademarks of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, author and educator Nancy Stouffer. But more than likely, Rowling's next efforts will largely be on behalf of the next installments in the series. And what after that? Eventually, Rosamund de la Hey suggests, Rowling may move away from children's books altogether, as the author has a lot of ideas that may or may not fall into that category. De la Hey says, "Undoubtedly, finishing the series will be an emotional moment for Jo, and it's impossible to second-guess her on what comes next."

Not so with what's happened so far. As they used to say about Elvis, thirty million fans can't be wrong.