The Crown Jewels, Part 5

Sadly, this is the final post in this series. This is as far as the books go. The other two in the series are still to be published at a future date.

Here is Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:

This is the longest book in the whole series, and as such, you get a lot more pages that look like this:

But you still get plenty of pictures like these:

I particularly love this one.

I was just looking to see when the next book might be released. They came out once a year, at first, but when they got to the larger books, they started taking closer to eighteen months to two years to arrive.

I found out bad news, while looking for a release date. One, I didn't find any release date, because, two, Jim Kay has decided to call it quits before finishing the series.

He wants to pass the torch to someone else. Probably because he did such an amazing job that people think that a page like this one below is a little disappointing.

Because they expect pages like these:

I'm pretty upset, if for nothing else than that the art style won't match the rest of the way. The books can't be quite the same. It will be a bummer. I hope, that when they finally get around to putting out the last two books they get somebody who is pretty similar, at least, so that the collection seems to go together whell on my shelf.

The Crown Jewels, Part 4

 Okay, it's time to talk about the fourth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

We have now made it into the territory of the really long Harry Potter books.

This book still has tons of great illustrations, but I believe that, even though the book is about twice as long as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, it still has the same number of illustrations.

There are a lot of pages with nothing at all, but there are so many illustrations still, and they're all so very glorious and impressive.

These pictures here are from three successive pages.

Since this was such a turning point in the series, they made sure to really do it up in these books.

I love it. It looks really great.

So, that's where the books made a jump from smaller to much larger. Yet this wasn't even the biggest book in the series. That one is coming up in tomorrow's post. Will it be worse? Lower quality? Tune in and find out.

The Crown Jewels, Part 3

 I've always been particularly partial to this book. Back in the late nineties, when I first started reading Harry Potter, I felt that they were pretty good, but mostly typical of children's literature. They felt like they had a lot in common with books by Roald Dahl, for example, and I wasn't too overly blown away. Then, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban came out, and it felt like the series took a humongous leap forward.

With this book, Rowling started expanding the stories. They were much more complex and interwoven.

The books jumped from nice books that people would enjoy into one of the best series that had every been written for kids, and good enough to excite adults as well.

I felt like the movies went that way as well. Christopher Columbus directed the first two films, and they were kind of pedestrian, but at the third movie, things suddenly sped up and got more interesting.

However, with that jump forward in complexity came a longer page count. This book was the first of those that was longer.

This book is only about seventy pages longer than the last one, but, although I haven't counted, I'm pretty sure it has about the same number of illustrations in the book.

Nevertheless, each illustration is just as impressive as the ones in the last two books.

The pictures are great, and it is hard to read the book without simply spending your time leafing through the pages to look at all the pictures.

So, I guess that this book is not like the original book or the movie.

It isn't a vast step forward in the series.

However, it was great, top of the line, cream of the crop, from the very beginning.

So, it didn't need to jump forward.

 It just kept up the tradition of excellence.

The Crown Jewels, Part 2

Okay, today is part two, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. 

It's another amazing edition of the series. From the inner flap...

To the very end, the book is another beautiful addition to my shelf.

Here's a smattering of the illustrations that you get in the book.

I can't imagine how long it took for poor Jim Kay to create all of these pictures.

I wonder if he realized just how much of his life was going to be swallowed up in this project.

Hopefully he was paid a lot.

It takes them about a year to release each new edition in the series, so he's definitely got a lot of work to do for each book.

 But if you ask me, it's effort well worth it.