What the final Harry Potter novel means for Vancouver’s Raincoast Books

Vancouver’s Raincoast Books keeps its offices over a 44,000-square-foot warehouse on the banks of the Fraser River. As the Canadian publisher and distributor of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the company’s headquarters has become a kind of paean to Potter paraphernalia. When you walk in, pennants and a huge pair of handmade quilts — depicting cover art for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — frame the entranceway. Four conference rooms (Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin) are named after the houses at Harry’s fictional alma mater, the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. And there’s a prominent spot for Rowling, too: her only visit to the complex, seven years ago, is captured in a large photograph hanging near the front desk.

It’s been nearly a decade since Raincoast landed publishing’s equivalent of the Alberta oilsands, and the numbers still boggle the mind. When the sixth novel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was published in July 2005, it sold more than 650,000 copies during its first weekend alone. This in a country of 31 million, where a brisk seller might move just 15,000 copies. When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final installment in Rowling’s series, becomes available on July 21, Raincoast will have published more than 10 million Potter books in Canada.

After all these years, it’s natural to wonder: How did a mid-sized, independent Canadian company somehow end up with the biggest bestseller of them all? And as the seven-part saga draws to a close, what comes next?