David Stonehouse Features

What's all this fuss about Harry?

The illustrator who created our first glimpse of Harry Potter says it was really just a job for him and he'd like to move on

By David Stonehouse

Thomas Taylor usually shuns interviews. A bunch of British papers were after him once, but he had little interest in talking about a sketch he did four years ago. Still doesn't, really.

But here he is on the phone, talking to me from his flat in England and not really sure why.

"I just said yes," the 27-year-old illustrator says and chuckles. "I heard you were from Canada, and that's slightly more interesting."

Four years ago, Taylor was a year out of arts school, busying himself working at a children's bookstore in Cambridge. What he really wanted to do was pen drawings for children's books, but he couldn't pay the bills with a pile of rejection slips from publishers.

His luck changed the day Harry Potter showed up.

Bloomsbury Publishing called from London and wanted him to do some sketches for a new book by an unknown Scottish author named J.K. Rowling. It was about an orphan wizard and his adventures at a magical boarding school.

Taylor' s first job would be to create the image behind possibly the most widely loved hero in the history of children' s literature -- something he's still not comfortable with.

"That's been something that has been a bit difficult to realize. I' m a little bit fed up with it, quite frankly -- though you probably can't say that. I just did this job, and it was just a book cover, and I wanted to get on, and it seemed to follow me around," Taylor says from the two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a Victorian home in Cambridge that he shares with two roommates.

"I've been asked to sign the book so often. I feel so bad about doing that. It is someone else's achievement, and I've drawn a picture on the front. And in a way, I don't want to be seen to be hopping on any bandwagons or anything. It's fine, it's interesting, it's opened doors in my career. But it isn't something that I think about every day."

The irritation about the fuss over his first-ever book-illustrating job seems at odds with the good-natured fellow on the other end of the phone. A few years ago, he wanted nothing to do with it. Now he seems to be coming around.

"I do have limited interest in it, as you can imagine -- it's just one job. At the same time, I realize it is such a big thing and I can't ignore that fact," he says.

Indeed, it is hard to ignore a publishing phenomenon that has taken children's literature by storm. The first three Harry Potter books have been translated into several languages and sold an estimated 37 million copies.

The fourth, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, is set for release on July 8 and is expected to sell out almost immediately as eager fans flock to stores hosting Harry Potter parties and, in some cases, opening at midnight to start selling Harry's latest exploits.

The cover illustration of the fourth novel is being kept under wraps until the big day, but it won't be a Thomas Taylor original. He did only the first -- the publisher gave the other two to another illustrator in the U.K., a man named Cliff Wright who, according to a Bloomsbury spokeswoman, doesn't give interviews.

"Harry gets older in every book and most of my work has been for a younger age," Taylor says. "I think they rather thought they ought to get someone in who could keep making the covers darker and darker as he gets older. That's what they've told me, anyway."

Taylor's image has become more closely associated with Harry Potter than the subsequent covers, gracing the box set sold in Canada and still popping up in newspapers with stories about the Potter phenomenon.

His Harry Potter -- a dark-haired, bespectacled kid, a bewildered look seizing him as he steps up to the Hogwarts Express -- nearly turned out not to be.

"I didn' t want to show his face at all. I always felt for that age group, between nine and 11, it is very important that people are free to use their imaginations when they are reading a story," Taylor says. "To impose my idea on how he looks on to everybody else is a bit unfair. I quite liked the idea that he would be coming toward the train and you
wouldn't quite get a clear view of him. But the editors, they decided I really ought to show him. And so I did."

He read Rowling's description of Harry and began sketching."He came across as being a bit of a geek at that stage of the story," he remembers. "I based him on someone I went to school with who seemed to fit the description quite well."

Pressed for details on this fellow who became an unwitting model for Harry Potter, Taylor allows that it was someone he went to college with, someone he is still in touch with. And also someone he has never shared the secret with.

And he's definitely not going to part with the guy's number.

"He'd probably be horrified if he heard about it, actually," Taylor says. "I might tell him one day.

"But people are saying it's a bit like me. I don't know whether subconsciously ..." he says, before dismissing the thought. "I don't think it looks anything like me, quite frankly."

He got paid (ps)500 -- about $1,150 -- for the cover job. Two months ago, his rough sketch of the same scene sold at auction for seven times that.

The books, meanwhile, have transformed Rowling from a single mother on welfare to Britain's third-richest woman. Her income this year alone is estimated to exceed $180-million.

Born the son of an antique dealer and interior decorator who both went to art school, Taylor grew up doodling -- he can' t remember a time when he wasn't drawing something. It just seemed natural that he go to art school when he grew up.

Now firmly into his career as an illustrator for children's books, he has his sights set on illustrating and writing his own books for teens. He dreams of some day moving out of Cambridge and travelling the world to paint the scenes he discovers.

For now, he loves the artistic lifestyle he leads. "The best thing is complete freedom -- to work at home, to work the hours I want to work and to do something which comes very naturally, something I love, and to be paid for it. It's quite a privilege," he says.

"As I've always said, it's better than working for a living."