KATHMANDU - An middle-aged, mostly bald Indian man in a black and white striped Polo shirt approached the small cashier's desk at Annapurna Books Sunday afternoon with a question.
"You have the new Harry Potter?"
His daughter, who looked about eight, eagerly awaited the answer to the question.
"No," the owner said without looking up. "Maybe tomorrow."
Annapurna Books is the typical Kathmandu book shop, one long room of half-new, half-used titles on traveling, climbing Himalayan Peaks, classic fiction, and the complete works of Dan Brown, author of the Da Vinci Code. It's a place where backpackers deposit what they've devoured during two weeks of trekking, and stock up before 18 hour bus rides through the Tibetan Plateau. The books are cheap and the selection quirky. It's a nice place, something that any American city would have had 20 years ago, before the rise of the mega chain stores.
But the owner and his some of colleagues around Kathmandu appear to be some of the last people on Earth not affected by Harry Potter fever.
Harry Potter went on sale around the world (except in America) at 12:00 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time at Saturday, July 21. Here on Nepal's strange time zone, that meant 9:15 a.m. After sleeping in and have a leisurely lunch of buffalo burger and Mountain Dew, I set off in search of the title.
The first place I went was a tiny affair, and had a large German section.
"Got Harry Potter?" I asked.
"Over there." The owner pointed to the used book section.
"No, the new one."
"What?"
He obviously didn't get it.
Twelve million copies will be sold in the next few days and this man doesn't know about the biggest event in the history of the publishing industry. Where am I?
Barnes & Noble Books -- no relation to the American book chain, a function of Nepal's poor copyright laws -- was a little more friendly. It might be in tomorrow, they said, perhaps the day after that. Today was a holiday, so the publisher couldn't send the books.
In the interest of learning more about Nepalese culture, I asked what holiday.
"Weekly holiday," the bookseller said. Saturday? They couldn't get Harry Potter because it's Saturday? The man who squeezes juice on the street works on Saturday. The traffic police work on Saturday. A couple people in the publishing industry couldn't put in a couple hours of overtime to get a book to a half-dozen stores?
United Books might have the least imaginative title of Kathmandu bookstores, but they are the most organized. They arranged for several dozen books to be flown in from India, and started selling at 9:15 a.m.
"We've sold quite a few," the German owner told me, even though he's selling the book for 1,600 rupees, what an average Nepali makes in three weeks.
During our conversation, the Indian family wandering in. They'd seen a copy in the display window, and the young daughter clutched the book in her arms. She looked quite happy.
United Books might have the least imaginative title of Kathmandu bookstores, but they are the most organized. They arranged for several dozen books to be flown in from India, and started selling at 9:15 a.m.
"We've sold quite a few," the German owner told me, even though he's selling the book for 1,600 rupees, what an average Nepali makes in three weeks.
During our conversation, the Indian family wandering in. They'd seen a copy in the display window, and the young daughter clutched the book in her arms. She looked quite happy.
