From PEOPLE Magazine
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Catie Hoch was very ill; a friend of Harry's offered comfort and laughter
Nine-year-old Catie Hoch was near death from neuroblastoma, a cancer in her lungs, liver and spine, when a friend asked what she would change about her life. "I wouldn't change a thing," Catie's mother says she replied. Not the illness? "No, I wouldn't change that," Catie said. "I made new friends."
Among them was J.K. Rowling. After learning of this fan's struggle from a friend of the Hoch family, Rowling e-mailed the Clifton Park, N.Y., second-grader in January 2000. "You are an extremely brave person and a true Gryffindor," Rowling's first note read. "It was a little bit of magic," says Catie's mom, Gina Peca, 44. E-mails led to phone calls, in which "Jo" read from the then-unfinished Goblet of Fire. "She would call after working all day," says Catie's dad, Larry Hoch, 43. "Catie's face would light up."
After Catie died on May 18,2000, Rowling wrote to Peca and Hoch: "I am crying so hard as I type. She left footprints on my heart." Last year, Rowling gave $100,000 to the Catie Hoch foundation, which funds day trips for hospitalized kids. Peca will make a donation of her own this month: She ordered two copies of Order of the Phoenix, one for sons Robby, 10, and John, 7, and one for Catie's school library. She'll pick up the books when she has the chance. But "if Catie were here," she says, at midnight on June 20, "we would be at the bookstore, waiting in line."
200 million copies of the first four Harry Potter books currently in print
222 million copies of Dr. Seuss's 44 children's books currently in print
8.5 million books in the initial U.S. print run of the new book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (left)
1 million copies of Phoenix preordered on Amazon worldwide
$4,000 amount the British publisher paid author J.K. Rowling for the first Potter book
13 abandoned barn owls discovered so far this year by Britain's Independent Midlands Birds of Prey Rescue Centre in Stourbridge. "People have been breeding them to sell on the black market since the Harry Potter films came out," center manager Chris Jones told an English newspaper.
$42,000 asking price for a signed edition from the original 1997 British print run of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (only 500 copies were printed)
Love Your Hat!
$ 470 MILLION: Rowling's net worth
$ 420 MILLION: Net worth of the Queen of England
55 languages into which Harry has been translated. Can you say Salaisuuksien Kammio? (That's "Chamber of Secrets" in Finnish.)
7 players on an official Quidditch team, as played with hula hoops and tennis rackets instead of broomsticks and bludgers by a boarding school in Wales
$8.50 cost of child-size twig broom made by Arthur Nash, a 300-year-old company that supplies brooms to the Royal Family. The kiddie brooms, says Nash's daughter Amanda Taylor, "really do sell because of Harry."
1 statement from a Vatican priest declaring that the devil is behind Harry Potter
1 statement from another Vatican priest declaring the witchcraft in the Potter books isn't "anti-Christian"
$40,000 price asked of The Sun newspaper for three chapters of Phoenix stolen by printing-plant worker Donald Parfitt. The Sun declined.
180 hours of community service Parfitt was sentenced to complete
More than 1 number of zealous young fans who have hurled themselves into a wall at London's King's Cross Station trying to get to Platform 9¾. "It's happened a couple of times," says a transit spokesperson. "It's all a bit much. We're trying to run a railway station."
7,680 copies of Phoenix stolen from a truck in England six days before the sale date
4 fake sequels published in China, including Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon. Rowling's lawyers put a stop to them.
100 kids spending the night of June 20 in Scotland's Alnwick Castle (right), which stands in for Harry's school on-screen. ("The young ones believe it's really Hogwarts," says a castle employee.) At midnight sleepover guests get their own copies of the new book.
119 requests filed to get the Harry Potter books removed from U.S. school libraries
1,079 days since the release of the last book
3 definitions of "muggle" in the latest Oxford English Dictionary. The word can mean a tail or a marijuana cigarette—and now, "a person who possesses no magical powers."
250,000 signatures the Russian politician who officially changed his name to Harry Ivanovich Potter needs to run for governor of Sverdlosk later this summer.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
