Harry Potter and the order of the Post Office ... the new stamps. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
As a child I treasured a set of stamps with colour photos of the Apollo moon landings: stamps that glowed with the gilded foil on the lunar lander. Now, Harry Potter is as big as Neil Armstrong. The Post Office has today issued stamps marking this summer's conclusion to JK Rowling's Hogwarts novels.
Good for them - Rowling's cultural achievement deserves every honour going. For once a writer, scribbling in an Edinburgh cafe, outdid all the loud noises and flashing lights of the moronic inferno. Hogwarts is a world you have to read - the films are half-baked versions, that don't live up to any reader's visualisation, and this is just as well, because the novels remain the heart of Harryism. I'm nervously awaiting the final fate of Rowling's characters, with a bit of envy for children and teenagers who encountered these stories at the right age.
My favourite Rowling novel - having read them all - is Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which wrenched the magic world of the earlier tales into a vortex of emotional and narrative seriousness. For me, all the maturing and darkness attributed to later volumes actually appears most effectively in this book. The next, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was a bit joyless but Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince finally knocked away all the reassuring architecture of Hogwarts.
Harry now stands in a world without illusions or protectors. Critics of Harry Potter say Hogwarts is a public school fantasy but who cares? These books have returned fiction to its popularity in the age of Dickens. Maybe Dr Who went a bit far in having Shakespeare get his ideas from Rowling via time travel. But Harry Potter may prove as enduring a British literary creation as Hamlet or Winnie the Pooh. How many Booker prize winners can you say that of? No Whitbread awards for Potter, but at least he's got his stamps ...
