Perhaps the evil Voldemort cast a spell on certain readers from the shadows of the wizarding world, forcing dozens of pages from the conclusion of the epic Harry Potter series to “disapparate.” (That’s “vanish” to us nonwizard Muggles.)
For whatever reason, hundreds of hapless Potterphiles discovered after the post-midnight release Saturday of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” that key pages were missing from the 759 that author J.K. Rowling wrote.
Publisher Scholastic Inc. said in a statement that pages had vanished in “only a few hundred copies” among the 8.3 million copies sold in the first 24 hours of the release.
“Printing and distributing 12 million copies of a book is a Herculean task, and it is not surprising that some books would have printing errors,” the statement said.
Ann Binkley, a spokeswoman for Borders bookstores, said, “It’s unfortunate, but it happens sometimes when you have a large print run.”
It happened to Jacki Moonves, 19, of Takoma Park, Md. She queued up in the wee hours Saturday to clinch her copy from the Borders in downtown Silver Spring. Sometime before dawn, she said, she extracted nose from book, utterly befuddled. Page 578 leaped to Page 611, just as the story was gathering momentum for a final battle.
It was, she said, as if a wily page thief — wand-wielding or no — had found the perfect wad of pages to send to the land of lost things.
“What’s a Muggle to do? I have no idea,” said Moonves, who hasn’t had time to grab a friend’s copy nor to return hers to the store, which, like the publisher, has said it will replace defective copies.
It had been several days of agony.
“I’m going out of my mind trying to figure out what happens next,” Moonves said.
Meanwhile, the misprints are quickly becoming collectors’ items. Susan Benne of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America said the group’s online discussion forum was atwitter Wednesday with talk of the first-edition flaws.
On the online network Craiglist, a notice from someone in Clarendon, Va., read: “Wanted: To trade complete Harry Potter ‘Deathly Hallows’ for defective.”
