15 years; 7 new covers!

Accio some thrilling news! Today, Scholastic unveiled an all-new cover for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone! And better yet, it’s just the first of seven (7!) new covers that will appear on U.S. trade paperback editions coming in September 2013. It’s all part of the upcoming 15th anniversary of the U.S. publication of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first book in J.K. Rowling’s best-selling Harry Potter series. The fact that we’re releasing new covers is awesome, but even more amazing is the incredible illustrator who designed them: Kazu Kibuishi! (You might know his name from his best-selling Amulet series, published by our Graphix imprint!) Kibuishi is a longtime Harry Potter fan who called this opportunity, “more than a little surreal.” “The Harry Potter covers by Mary GrandPré are so fantastic and iconic,” he says in the press release. “When I was asked to submit samples, I initially hesitated because I didn’t want to see them reinterpreted! However, I felt that if I were to handle the project, I could bring something to it that many other designers and illustrators probably couldn’t, and that was that I was also a writer of my own series of middle grade fiction. As an author myself, I tried to answer the question, ‘If I were the author of the books – and they were like my own children – how would I want them to be seen years from now?’ When illustrating the covers, I tried to think of classic perennial paperback editions of famous novels and how those illustrations tend to feel. In a way, the project became a tribute to both Harry Potter and the literary classics.” Good Morning America broke the news earlier today with an interview with Kibuishi, which you can find right here. Entertainment Weekly, The Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, USA Today, NPR, MTV Hollywood Crush, and Huffington Post also reported on the story! You can see the new cover to book 1 here, but you’re probably wondering, what about the other six? Well, each of the new covers will depict a distinctive and memorable moment from its respective book. Do you have any ideas about what the next ones will look like? We’d love to hear them in the comments…although our lips are sealed until later this year!