The plot thickens for a harried man

Ian Munro, New York
April 19, 2008

IF THE boy wizard Harry Potter were to ease gracefully into middle age, unmarked by stress or strain, at 50 he would come to resemble Steven Vander Ark.

In turn, Mr Vander Ark may be testimony to the advantages of a life lived amid fantasy. With his pudding-bowl haircut, near rimless spectacles and endless enthusiasm for a fictional universe, he makes a youthful 50-year-old.

He has read the seven Harry Potter books "30 or 40 times". He claims to have read every interview Potter's creator, J. K. Rowling, has conducted. He has given the better part of nine years of his life to crafting, maintaining and endlessly revising a website dedicated to the Harry Potter series.

And he is at the centre of a historic legal case in which Rowling is trying to stop the publication of an encyclopedia based on his website, The Harry Potter Lexicon, but which she says plunders her work, with wholesale lifting of distinctive phrases and inventions.

This week he was reduced to breathless sobbing when he admitted in court that he had become something of a pariah in "the Harry Potter community".

Rowling had a setback of her own when the judge said that the names of her characters and places sounded like gibberish.

In an exchange with a witness, Judge Robert Patterson admitted that he was not a fan.

"I found it extremely complex," he said, even more so than the novels of Dickens that his own father read to him as a child.

Observing this with his customary air of faint amusement was Mr Vander Ark's collaborator, Roger Rapoport, the principal of RDR Books, a lightweight publishing operation based in Michigan.

Mr Rapoport routinely promises bonuses to his writers should their work be elevated to The New York Times bestseller list. It is not a promise he has had to honour.

Last August, Mr Rapoport saw a newspaper article about Mr Vander Ark's extensive website. An amateur obsession was about to encounter commercial opportunism. Mr Rapoport suggested publishing the Harry Potter lexicon as a book.

He brushed aside Mr Vander Ark's worries about possible breaches of copyright, and when Rowling's lawyers learned of it and inquired about it, Mr Rapoport lay low.

Mr Vander Ark was cautious. While culling his website to publishable length, he had Mr Rapoport indemnify him against action for breach of copyright.

Still willing to defend his work, Mr Vander Ark said this week: "A lexicon book is a guide to a piece of literature, so naturally it refers back to the source material. That's the sort of book it is. There are places that we use phrases that are identical or similar. In the process of creating a reference work of this kind, that would be acceptable."

The lexicon, he argued, was a synthesis of everything Rowling had written, her canon of seven novels, companion volumes and material prepared for electronic Potter games.

It was a "ready reference guide" for readers contending with a long and complex series, although Rowling countered that it was a spoiler prematurely unveiling plot twists.

She also maintained that the lexicon could harm the prospects for her own intended encyclopedia, its proceeds to go to charity.

Mr Vander Ark's evident regard for Rowling and his boyish enthusiasm for the "ready reference guide", bolstered Mr Rapoport's case, even though his evidence was evasive and often monosyllabic.

But the copyright law of fair use is, in the judge's words, "murky". He urged the parties to settle the case before he ruled on it.

That might suit Mr Vander Ark. He would like nothing more than the respect and approval of J. K. Rowling. Instead, now he knows how it feels to be her Voldemort.

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