A few days ago, at one of the largest sports stadiums in Canada, a voice on the public address system told a crowd of 20,000-odd hushed tweens, teens and young hearts of all ages that the afternoon’s Quidditch match had been put off.

They said it had been postponed in favor of an even more magical event: a spell-casting by J.K. Rowling, aka a reading from the zoom-fastest seller in her wizarding book series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

(Finally, Harry removes his invisibility cloak and we can write him in as guest wizard in Playback. This is better than Every Flavor beans, better even than the capture of the Golden Snitch in a Quidditch match against Slytherin!)

Say it aloud with me, people: twenty thousand fans. Many of who dressed up in wizard costumes. Who came out enrobed on a school day to hear a woman read from her book. Who noted the timbre of her English accent. And who observed that her expression mixed equal parts delight and terror. What if she let them all down?

But, as a young lady from the audience explained afterwards on CBC Radio, even if it is a tad disappointing to hear a mere reading in the wake of all the hype, the great love of the book and the characters Rowling created, all of that remains.

And such is the raw awe of books, potent triggers not only of some of the finest television and movies for all, but also of many merch campaigns destined to bewitch the young.

Of course, as the case studies in our Special Report (begins on p. 19) make clear, tv and merchandise marketing campaigns don’t need a book in order to succeed. But my, my, my, the sales they can conjure up with strong books to power them. Look at what Caillou did, even before landing a u.s. tv sale.

There’s no official word yet if Harry is flying off to the small screen after his film debut, but literary license program merchandise is already out there. There is even a game on the Net that looks a lot like Quidditch, which is a kind of airborne cross between basketball and lacrosse. In stores, even generic Hallowe’en-ready wizard hats, capes, black wigs and face paint for lightning bolt scars are fairly flying off the shelves.

Reading our kids merch report, couldn’t help but think it’s a mad, mad, sleight-of-hand world out there in international licensing. And once all the licensor, licensee, and agent contractual details are finally aligned with the stars, won’t the contracts yellow quickly if the tv series is cancelled after one cycle?

As one kids tv producer told the crtc in August, as part of a pitch for a book-centred digital specialty, ‘we live and breathe books.’

While it was great to hear J.K. Rowling interpret her prose in her own voice, the young lady reporting on the event to CBC Radio had to agree she preferred to imagine Harry’s world herself, first, by reading the book.

And when they’re strong, books can breathe the most exuberant, long life into a producer’s dream of merch, internationally renowned merch.