Rowling wizardry gets notes for last Potter through US security

JK Rowling

NEW YORK - Confronted with intransigent security officials at John F Kennedy Airport, JK Rowling found herself in serious need of one of those flying stick contraptions she dreamed up for the young Harry Potter of her best selling wizardry books as an alternative means of crossing the Atlantic.

Ms Rowling's journey home from New York, where she had attended a charity public reading with fellow writers Stephen King and John Irving last month, started to go awry as soon as she reached the terminal.

No Madam, they tried to explain, you will not be taking that package beneath your arm on board. Everything must be placed in checked-in baggage.

These were the days, of course, that followed revelations of a plot by alleged terrorists in Britain to blow airliners en route to the United States and the restrictions, which are largely still being applied to UK-bound travellers in America, were very clear. Even books could not be taken aboard in hand luggage.

But Ms Rowling's bundle was not exactly a book but rather a book in progress.

Specifically, what she was clasping so zealously to her breast were notes and manuscript pages of the seventh and final episode of the Harry Potter adventures.

Apparently the Edinburgh author had no copies of the scribblings she had made while in America. Let go of it she would not.

Whether through patient charm or simply the power of her fame, Ms Rowling did eventually prevail and the risk that the book so eagerly awaited by so many Harry Potter fans might somehow have vanished mid-way across the Atlantic - or have been misdirected to an airport in some distant land - was averted.

She was forced to take neither a flying broom nor a cruise liner to return to her Edinburgh home.

And now she has recovered sufficiently to recall the fraught moments when author and manuscript were nearly separated to fans on her website.

"A large part of it is handwritten and there was no copy of anything I had done while in the US," she said.

"They let me take it on thankfully, bound up in elastic bands. I don't know what I would have done if they hadn't - sailed home probably."

Ms Rowling has also admitted to suffering from a quandary while in New York over the best title for the seventh book, which she insists will be the last ever in the wildly popular series.

"I was quite happy with one until the other one struck me while I was taking a shower in New York," she revealed.

"They would both be appropriate, so I think I'll have to wait until I'm further into the book to decide which one works best."

Losing the notes would, at the very least, have meant a delay in the completion of the new book and additional weeks agony for her faithful readers for whom the normal frenzy of anticipation is already higher than ever thanks to Ms Rowling's recent hints that she plans to kill of not one but two of the major characters in the series.

- INDEPENDENT