The Wizardly Editor Who Caught the Golden Snitch

Yet he also displayed, from the beginning, an instinct for fiction that would sell.

In that initial Putnam job, he happened to be the first to read "Redwall," by Brian Jacques. "I was over the moon," he says about the opening volume of what would become an immensely popular series. When his boss wouldn't go for it, he asked permission to take it down the hall to Philomel, a Putnam imprint. Much later, when he was heading the children's division at Knopf, he enhanced his reputation by acquiring Philip Pullman's celebrated "His Dark Materials" trilogy.

This track record gave him some credibility when -- in the spring of 1997 -- he flew off to the Bologna Children's Book Fair and fell in love with a pre-adolescent wizard.

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Barry Cunningham is one of the only people in the world who know what Levine was feeling when he read J.K. Rowling for the first time. Cunningham is the Man Who Bought Harry Potter in the First Place -- for Bloomsbury Children's Books, a then-tiny British outfit, in 1996. He really liked Rowling's manuscript, especially the relationships among the characters and the way they showed "the power of friendship" -- but that didn't mean he thought it would sell much.

After haggling with her agent for what he says "must have been fully five minutes," he bought the manuscript for a sum in the low four figures. Then, worried about his impecunious new author, he advised Rowling to get "a proper day job."

It wasn't Bloomsbury's responsibility to sell the U.S. rights to Harry. The company didn't even own them. But when Levine showed up in Bologna seeking future classics for his new Scholastic imprint, Bloomsbury's rights director gave him a set of Potter galleys. He read them on the plane home. When the book came up for auction, he kept bidding until, at $105,000, his last competitor dropped out.

"I would have been willing to go further than that if I had to," he says.

Levine must have told this story a thousand times by now. But there's still excitement in his voice as he describes how he got instantly hooked -- "first chapter, first pages" -- on Harry.

"I remember I loved this story of a boy who is treated very badly and really made to feel insignificant and powerless," he says. "And then, out of the blue, comes this invitation out." Not only does the invitation promise escape from a life of constant abuse by the "family" that wishes you were invisible, but in your new, magic world, you are already a legend and destined to become "a person of great stature."

There's also this fantastic sport called quidditch, which you turn out to be better at than anyone in your whole school. Who couldn't relate to that?

"I wasn't neglected. I didn't sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. My family loves me," Levine says with a laugh. "That doesn't mean I didn't feel invisible and I didn't feel powerless and I didn't have the fantasy that I would be recognized someday. This is something we all share."