Book Chat: Paper, Weight in Harry Potter

I. "Harry Potter used up all our paper."

Here's an eye-opening word-problem that opens Paul Collins's Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books (2003):

     "It's a good thing, my editor says,"that your book isn't being published right now."
     "Oh?"
     "Because"––he leans forward––"Harry Potter used up all our paper."
     "You're joking."
     "Seriously... I'm telling you the truth. There's two major paper producers for New York publishers, and with a five-million print run of an eight-hundred-page book, well... everybody else has to wait in line."

Isn't that wild? I've never thought of that equation.
I was never good at setting up word problems, but let's do the math.

5 million books x 800 pages = 4 billion pages of paper.
That's how many pages were in the print run of the fifth(?*) Harry Potter book.
Four billion. Can that be right?
I double checked. Yes, 5mm x 800 = 4,000,000,000 pages of paper.

So, further, how many trees does it take to make 4 billion pages of paper?

According to Ribble Paper Packaging:
On average, "a standard pine tree, with 45ft of the usable trunk and a diameter of eight inches, will produce around 10,000 sheets of paper."

Let's see...
That's 4 billion pages (in the print run of the Harry Potter novel) divided by 10,000 (pages per tree), right?

The answer is 400,000. Four hundred thousand. Trees. To make 4 billion pages.

Please check my math, but I think that's right.
400,000 trees (at 10,000 pages per tree) produce 4,000,000,000 (4 billion) pages of paper.

And the upshot is . . . BUY USED BOOKS!!!

As Shaun Bythell points out in his Diary of a Bookseller, the huge print runs are why first editions of Harry Potter books (and other massive bestsellers) aren't worth much. (Usually--some of the first run of the first HP book bring in large amounts).

Harry Potter books still sell well, and if we get like-new hardcovers at the thrift store, I can sell them for a quarter of their cover price––say, $7 for the last volume, HP and the Deathly Hallows, which lists at $35.
(You can buy it for half the list price at Nagini... I mean, Amazon.
Nagini is Voldemort's snake.)

II. "taken for granted efforts yet unwavered"

Have you seen the illustrated Harry Potters by artist Jim Kay?
[His website, Creepy Scrawlers, with his partner, the milliner Louise Clark. Also on Instagram.]

Here's Kay's illustration of Hermione Granger in the first book, (from a good selection––worth looking at––in The Guardian).
Sometimes Hermione is portrayed as almost a fuss-budget, and J K Rowling has her crying all the time,
but Kay shows her seriousness of intent and her almost freakish (for a child), focused intelligence.

Kay's illustrations add weight  to the sometimes emotionally . . . slight books. His vision is dark and dignified, not cute-magic.
Emotionally slight? Are J. K. Rowling's books slight?
I've always felt they were a bit, yes.
Did you?
But JKR's intricate world is robust too, and it can  s t r e t c h  like Stretch Armstrong.

I only heard of Kay's illustrated editions last Christmas. Come to think of it, it was his vision that laid the ground for me to read Harry Potter again, when I was laid up this summer with a sore shoulder and had a copy of HP: Deathly Hallows (to take it to the store). I was surprised that I liked the story more this time--looking past the disappointment.

 Kay takes a realistically dark view. To illustrate Hagrid the groundskeeper, for instance, he said:

"While designing Hagrid I looked at the eyes of different alcoholics, both locally and through history.
I was fascinated with Luke Kelly's face, from [Irish band] The Dubliners, but eventually settled on the eyes of Winston Churchill, and the nose of somebody I saw in my local town."

I was sorry to read that with this month's publication of the illustrated HP: Order of the Phoenix (book 5) comes the announcement that Kay has had to give up illustrating the rest of the Harry Potters due to his mental health. He lives with bipolar disorder.

Maybe that's where some of his understanding of darkness comes from? Of the Order of the Phoenix, he wrote,

"It’s great that this is a slightly darker book, and the children are getting older. This is getting more into my comfort zone now. I really struggled with the first two books."

So, yeah, maybe so.
But––and this is a HUGE but––just last week, on October 13–-Kay also wrote on his IG a rejection of the idea that mental illness helps art.**
Here, from the text alongside a scene of grief in Dumbledore’s office.

I was in a terrible place when I did this, and it kind of shows.

I get very frustrated when people try and imply that having mental health problems somehow helps you as an artist.
It doesn’t.
It impacts your work, your life, it estranges you from people you love, and you are left constantly thinking what you could have achieved were it not for your illness.
And therein lies the worst part; it makes you a self pitying, and ultimately selfish horror to be around.

Then you get a blank sheet of paper and think ‘maybe this time, things will be better’. The blank page is hope, the chance that maybe next time, I’ll get it right.

When I was young and romantic and knew nothing about pain, I thought that if pain brought insight,  it was worth it.
Now, making cuckoo clocks without pain sounds good to me.
Not that we get to choose. 

Jim Kay talked further about living with BPD in an interview in 2018 with ArtDependence:

"I am very fond of gardening.
I suffer from bipolar disorder, which makes most of my daily life a living hell, but oddly when I garden it's the only time I can think positively about the future.
You are creating a living visual picture that comes into fruition a year or maybe longer from now.

"Everything else in my life is a battle to just get through the day. It's almost impossible to plan ahead - except when I look at the garden.
I only get a few minutes a day out there, but without it I'd be lost."

I am sorry Kay has had to give up illustrating Harry Potter.
I hope being free of it will bring relief as well as grief–– "crushing", he called it.
He's done extraordinary work on shorter projects--such as the  illustrations for A Monster Calls (...about grief and relief).
Godwilling, he will create many more.

________________

The comment, below, on this illustration on Jim Kay's IG is such a wonderful tribute, it made me cry.

thyme_.kartiki

Good morning Sir, these pure lives which you have rendered our world, it's genius sir, honestly.
For all your extreme and serious efforts, probably even taken for granted efforts yet unwavered. Sir, you created for us something that had and is still helping us grow, be unafraid, be proud of work, be confident, be natural, be ourselves, humble, true, honest, using our efforts where the words shall only help and never ever in the slightest, harm.
You brought it back to life for us.
From the very bottom of our hearts, of the entire wizarding pottermore community. Mr. Jim Kay, thank you, from a fellow Luna.

• 
  

creepy_scrawlers thank you x

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*The book with the 5-million print run must have been the fifth Harry Potter book, The Order of the Phoenix (2003)--the longest at 870 pages according to "How Many Pages in Harry Potter?".

__________________

**What Jim Kay says about mental illness not aiding art reminds me of what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in "The Crack Up", and David Foster Wallace in "The Depressed Person".
Hilary Mantel, too, said something along the same lines about suffering and art.

Mantel lived with debilitating pain from endometriosis and migraines. Because she couldn't work a regular job, she was trapped at home. Also, surgery left her unable to have children. She had time to write, when she felt "half-well".
I wish I could find the source of something I read somewhere--but where?––Mantel writing that when someone told her that her pain was a gift because it let her be a writer, she replied that she'd rather not have the pain.

Searching, I found this:


"Historians and, I’m afraid, doctors, underestimate what chronic pain can do to sour the temper and wear away both the personality and the intellect."

– From "Hilary Mantel in Her Own Words", a round-up of quotes in The Guardian


Also not the source I was looking for, but a good article about Mantel and the body in pain, from this week's New Yorker:
www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/hilary-mantels-double-vision