This June marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” To celebrate a quarter century of magic, the author J. K. Rowling made public her original manuscripts, journals, and drafts, revealing some of the characters that just missed apparating onto the page and into our hearts.
Let’s take a look!
One of the mystical shops that never made it to the cobblestoned streets of Diagon Alley was Quattle Sticks, a bargain wand emporium run by the gaunt, jittery Tommy Quattlebaum. According to early outlines found in Rowling’s journals, Quattlebaum would sweat uncontrollably as he followed customers around his dilapidated warehouse, refusing to explain why there were never any wands in stock. Tourists would flock to the establishment to witness his quirks, such as slipping shoppers handwritten notes that said things like “I swear I am a good man” and “You have to go.” In an abandoned “Goblet of Fire” story line, Quattlebaum is found strangled in the basement of his own store, which is revealed to be a storage hub for semisynthetic opioids on an international black-market trade route.
One of the most vile villains of all time almost wasn’t. Close study of early versions of the series’ main antagonist reveals Voldemark, a wizard known casually as Mark, who lives in a repurposed van in Austin, Texas. Mark still tortured innocent wizards and Muggles, but not with the unforgivable and now iconic “Avada Kedavra” spell. Instead, he forced his victims to endure a series of frustrating and confusing seminars promoting blockchain technology. If anyone made it out alive, they did so disoriented and broke after unwittingly investing in a pump-and-dump crypto scam. Rowling switched gears when she realized that Mark was too unlikable, stating, “I just couldn’t stand writing him, with his vague Sanskrit tattoos and his constant use of the R-word.”
Can you believe that your favorite trio of best friends was originally a quartet? In multiple drafts, Harry, Ron, and Hermione welcomed a fourth squad member: a Belgian transfer student named Grapefruit Linda. On top of grappling with teen-age angst and fighting death-defying battles, this inseparable bunch also ran an illegal gambling ring out back, behind Honeydukes sweetshop. Students would place bets on whether the angry, bald Linda could wrap her entire mouth around a grapefruit, and Linda would always, without exception, fail, and then fall asleep for hours. As Linda distracted too much from the main thrust of the series, her short stint in the friend group came to an end, along with Ron’s original catchphrase: “Linda is going to absolutely ruin our lives.”
Trying to piece together Donna has proven a bit of a nightmare for Rowling scholars. With details scrawled only on used napkins, apparently Donna “does what she wants,” “owns no clothing,” and “could surf on top of the Hogwarts Express, no problem.” The character reads very thin, but sources tell us that’s because Rowling conceived of Donna while on a mescaline high, as also evidenced by Donna’s only written line of dialogue: “I love mescaline.”
Deep in the Forbidden Forest, among the centaurs and giant spiders, once dwelled the mysterious beings known as Jiff and Clara Piffon. Formerly spritely, young wood nymphs, this now exhausted middle-aged couple is described as “trying the polyamory thing” to revive “any spark at all” at the advice of their psychiatrist, Dr. Josiah Goldberg. Potter lore states that if one were to wander into the woods after dark, one would slowly be lured by their drunken pleas into a misguided throuple situation—trapped, eternally, in their endless circular arguments, somehow ending up as their fucking mediator. Though Rowling never drafted anything past the Piffons trying to save their marriage with that zip-lining-getaway fiasco, she has informed readers that the fictional characters have since split up and that Clara now lives with a woman. Jiff, meanwhile, got a condo in Key West and bleached what’s left of his hair—like that’s gonna help.
Apparently, Rowling always planned to give every character a “dark twin” that would perform the entire story simultaneously and in reverse. She abandoned the idea after attempting the first chapter, where baby Harry is delivered to his aunt’s doorstep while also running and screaming backward through a demolished Hogwarts that is rebuilding itself in a “cacophony of suicidal insanity.” Luckily, those pages lived on, and the famous Potterhead Christopher Nolan used them as inspiration for his 2020 film, “Tenet.”
Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, the only wizard the Dark Lord ever feared, was, until the very last draft, the street magician David Blaine. “It was heartbreaking to replace Blaine,” Rowling has now revealed. “The fundamental concept of Harry Potter was ‘What if David Blaine ran a school for British children?’ But ultimately the publishers wanted Dumbledore, and I was too young and timid to put my foot down.” Early manuscripts show quite a noticeable difference between the characters. Instead of searching for Horcruxes while wearing half-moon spectacles and sweeping purple robes, Blaine would strut the school hallways in his signature black muscle tee, stopping students to perform card tricks for them or eat glass. Instead of spouting poignant turns of phrase such as “To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure,” Blaine would mostly just mutter, “Look, watch. Look here, watch, watch.” Or, if he was feeling particularly whimsical, “Look, wait. Let’s try this. Look, here, watch . . . hold on, look.” The story line Rowling most regrets losing involved Blaine becoming addicted to the Pensieve, a device used to relive memories, and using it ten hours a day to bum around Burbank strip clubs with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire in the mid-nineties.
We just read the backs of the napkins and learned that Donna “blacked out in Quatle [sic] Sticks, did something very bad, need passport.” Though we’ll never fully understand what these cryptic notes allude to, we wish Donna bon voyage on her exciting international adventures!