Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K.

Rowling is the fifth novel in the ​Harry

Potter series and the longest book of the series. The author has dedicated it to her husband

and children, who have made her world magical. It was published on ​21 June 2003 and sold

five million copies in the first 24 hours of publication. Exactly one month later, the first official

translation of the book was released in Vietnamese. Several weeks after, the book appeared

in Serbian, which was the first official European translation, and my first encounter with

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix​.

I remember how I couldn’t stop reading, finishing the whole novel in two days, but also being

delighted with numerous new details of the Serbian edition such as hardcover, page layout,

page numbers, typeface, illustrations, explanatory footnotes about magical creatures

adapted from ​Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them​. During the work on this text, I

realised that Serbian first edition of the ​Harry Potter series is actually modeled after the first

American edition!

The US edition of ​HP and OotP was published ​in New York by Arthur A. Levine Books, in

July 2003. Arthur A. Levine Books was an imprint at Scholastic Books, founded in 1996 and

specialized in fiction and nonfiction literature for children. Arthur Levine, the founder and

himself a children’s author, ​first heard of Rowling at a 1997 book fair in Bologna, Italy, where

he was shown a manuscript of her first Potter novel by a representative of her British

publisher, Bloomsbury. It is said that Levine read it on the flight home, knowing from the first

lines that he ​had t​ o publish it and expected to be a classic. And so it was - Scholastic with

Arthur Levine as the editor has been Rowling’s publisher for all ​HP ​books. Covers and

​ ooks are enriched by Mary GrandPré’s enchanting

chapters of every first US edition of ​HP b

illustrations. Interesting fact is that Rowling and GrandPré collaborated ​without saying a

word:​ GrandPré praised Rowling’s writing as very descriptive, with plenty of visual

description of the atmosphere, the setting, and the various creatures and people, which

made illustrator’s work much easier. She used pastels and toned printmaking paper.

Remarkably, the illustrations give hints about what will happen in each chapter or within the

book, without making it very obvious where the plot is headed.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ​is in shades of blue. Characteristically, it has a

dust jacket with recognizable raised lettering to spine and front cover, and boards with an

embossed diamond pattern. Besides the illustrations, what captures the imagination of

readers are different typefaces. The colophon at the end of the book, printed in a shape of a

diamond, informs us that David Saylor was the art director, Manuela Soares was the

managing editor, the manufacturing director was Angela Biola, while the edition was printed

and bound in Martinsburg, West Virginia; we find out that no old-growth forests were used to

create the paper for the book, and the last, but not at least, in which typeface the text was

set.

It is 11.5-pt Adobe Garamond, a typeface based on the sixteenth-century type designs of

Claude Garamond, redrawn by Robert Slimbach in 1989. Garamond’s typefaces represent

old-style serif letter design, letters with a relatively organic structure resembling handwriting

with a pen, but with a slightly more structured, upright design. Nothing suspicious if you ask

me: have you ever wondered does Scrivenshaft's Quill Shop have the semi-annual sale or

how many flavors of the sugar squill are sold at Honeyduke? Because the quill is certainly a

​ orld!
thing in the HP​ w

The next most used type is Able, designed in 1997 by Marcus Burlile. This font, used for the

chapter heads, opening initials, running titles, and page numbers, is widely recognized

simply as ​the Harry Potter font.

Several other typefaces we can recognize in ​HP and OotP.​ We see them as handwritten

signatures in letters ​written ​by different characters, as well as headlines from newspapers

and educational decrees. However, this visual disharmony is a disharmony only on the

surface - Gotica font used for Ministry of Magic may symbolise conservative, ‘medieval’

attitudes that pompous Ministry of Magic expresses; different fonts used for headlines from

The Daily Prophet, a state-controlled medium, and The Quibbler, a tabloid marketed as an

alternative voice, represent two confronted sides and their polarized approach to the

protagonists; finally, fonts used for handwritten signatures breathe new life into the

characters and underline their personalities - maybe we need a graphologist?!