An original watercolor illustration for the cover of "Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone," the first book in J.K. Rowling's series, sold for $1.9 million at a Sotheby's auction earlier this week. Thomas Taylor was just 23 and working in a bookshop when he painted Harry on Platform 9 3/4, awaiting the Hogwarts Express. Here's CBS's report on the auction. Click the second link to read Thomas Taylor's account of creating the iconic image.
"If you think about Harry Potter books as emblematic of where we are, even though those books were written by a women they tend to be very traditionally sexist, very imperialist and racist in the sense that once again we have our little European white-boy hero. And I'm not here to say those books are not enjoyable or valuable, but they certainly don't offer a paradigm that breaks with conventional thinking. And the question to me isn't so much 'Why are the Harry Potter books so well received?' but: Why aren't other books that are alternative, that offer different kinds of visions, just as popular? Because we do know that a very patriarchal, white male-dominated mass media really pushed the Harry Potter books. ... People say to me,'Well, children really love them." I say, Well, guess what? Children wouldn't have known anything about what some white female in England is writing without a powerful patriarchally based mass media that really hyped these books.
"And one of the constant struggles for feminist thinking and writing and our visions is that we rarely have access to that kind of powerful mainstream media. There are wonderful visionary feminist #books that no one reads. They don't get hyped." - bell hooks on #HarryPotter, Bitch magazine, 2000