“We started the Harry Potter Book Club as a way to bring kids, some of whom maybe only knew the movies, back to the books, and introduce this wonderful world to them.
“In the last year, we’d been thinking of how to make Harry Potter accessible and relevant to a new audience of eight- and nine-year-olds,” she says. “His passion for this world is incredible, so he seemed like the perfect person.”īerger says that the new covers are one of the ways Scholastic is reaching out to new Harry Potter fans. “We’re incredibly fond of Kazu’s work,” says Ellie Berger, president of Scholastic Trade Publishing. Scholastic believes he is doing just that. “I’m an author as well and I know how much work I put into my own covers, so I thought ‘this won’t be bad.’ But when I came to do it, I realized how much more this project meant to me. “I’ve never worked so hard on single images in my life!” he says. However, he notes that he has put pressure on himself, wanting to live up to GrandPré’s example. “I have the advantage of seeing the books in historical context,” Kibuishi says. Kibuishi believes he may have it a bit easier than Mary GrandPré, the artist who created the original U.S. In a way, the first Harry Potter cover should feel like Dickens.”
I wanted to take those two things and fuse them together.
I wanted to pay tribute to the series itself and to classic literature. But after thinking about it for a while, I figured if someone were going to do it, I should try it.” Though the assignment was daunting at first, Kibuishi says he started thinking about the Harry Potter books “as if I was looking back at them from the future. “Initially I didn’t want to see it done,” Kibuishi told PW, “because I love the original covers so much. The new artwork is by Kazu Kibuishi (click on the cover for an enlarged version), creator of the bestselling graphic novel series Amulet (Scholastic/Graphix). trade paperbacks editions this September and today reveals the first one, for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. To mark this milestone, Scholastic will be publishing seven all-new covers on its U.S. readers first met Harry Potter and traveled with him to Hogwarts via J.K.