Brown grad Arthur Levine bought the U.S. rights to Harry Potter when J.K. Rowling was unknown. “I remember loving the humor, thinking she is so funny,” Levine says.

The Washington Post / HELAYNE SEIDMAN HELAYNESEIDMAN

NEW YORK — There are a lot of great things about being The Man Who Brought Harry Potter to America: You don’t have to care about the latest Potter movie, for example, or the bazillion-copy print run for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (on sale Saturday) or the Harry Potter theme park scheduled to go into competition with Disney World as early as 2009.

“The fact that there’s a theme park has no effect on my life,” Arthur Levine says.

Don’t get him wrong: The veteran children’s book editor — who has his own imprint at Scholastic and who, in 1997, famously took a flyer on the first book by a British unknown named Joanne Rowling — is far from ungrateful for the ridiculously pervasive cultural phenomenon Harry Potter has become. “That’s what you want for every great book,” he says. “To have an audience and have people talking about it.”

Levine is 45, with short, graying hair and a ready smile that contains just a hint of the cat who got the cream.

He can’t talk about what’s in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, of course, but he’s dying to. Tell him that some Potter-savvy teens have urged you to brush up on the nuances of horcruxes before plunging in and he laughs infectiously.

“You’d better!” he says.

Levine’s life story should be an inspiration to English majors everywhere.

He grew up in Elmont, Long Island, right on the edge of Queens, with a doctor father and a mother who was a teacher and an artist. “I always was an English kind of guy,” he says, and he read “really broadly” from an early age. Among many beloved books he mentions are Russell Hoban’s Frances stories, Michael Bond’s Paddington series and fantasies by Edgar Rice Burroughs, J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin.

At Brown he majored in English and creative writing, with an emphasis on poetry. After graduation, he signed up for the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course, a well-known first step toward entry-level publishing jobs. When he completed it, the director asked what part of publishing he’d like to be in.

“I said, ‘I want to be a children’s book editor,’ ” Levine recalls. “And he said, ‘Don’t do that. You will NEVER get a job.’ ” There weren’t enough of them, it seemed, and their occupants seemed never to leave.

Here comes that smile again: “I’m glad I didn’t listen to that one particular piece of advice.” G.P. Putnam’s Sons hired him as an editorial assistant a few months later.

For the first decade or so of Levine’s career — during which he also worked at Knopf and Dial — he mostly did heed another bit of conventional wisdom. The word then was that fiction for children, especially in hardcover, didn’t sell. On one level, this was fine with Levine. He had his mother’s love for art and he’d chosen children’s books in the first place because “for me, it was poetry and art together.” So he made his reputation with picture books.

“I was known for Mirette on the High Wire and Officer Buckle and Gloria,” he says.

Much later, when he was heading the children’s division at Knopf, he enhanced his reputation by acquiring Philip Pullman’s celebrated His Dark Materials trilogy.

This track record gave him some credibility when — in the spring of 1997 — he flew off to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and fell in love with a pre-adolescent wizard.

Barry Cunningham is one of the only people in the world who know what Levine was feeling when he read J.K. Rowling for the first time. Cunningham is The Man Who Bought Harry Potter in the First Place — for Bloomsbury Children’s Books, a then-tiny British outfit, in 1996. He really liked Rowling’s manuscript, especially the relationships among the characters and the way they showed “the power of friendship” — but that didn’t mean he thought it would sell much.

After haggling with her agent for what he says “must have been fully five minutes,” he bought the manuscript for a sum in the low four figures. Then, worried about his impecunious new author, he advised Rowling to get “a proper day job.”

It wasn’t Bloomsbury’s responsibility to sell the U.S. rights to Harry. The company didn’t even own them. But when Levine showed up in Bologna seeking future classics for his new Scholastic imprint, Bloomsbury’s rights director gave him a set of Potter galleys. He read them on the plane home. When the book came up for auction, he kept bidding until, at $105,000, his last competitor dropped out.

“I would have been willing to go further than that if I had to,” he says.

Levine must have told this story a thousand times by now. But there’s still excitement in his voice as he describes how he got instantly hooked — “first chapter, first pages” — on Harry.

“I remember I loved this story of a boy who is treated very badly and really made to feel insignificant and powerless,” he says. “And then, out of the blue, comes this invitation out.” Not only does the invitation promise escape from a life of constant abuse by the “family” that wishes you were invisible, but in your new, magic world, you are already a legend and destined to become “a person of great stature.”

There’s also this fantastic sport called quidditch, which you turn out to be better at than anyone in your whole school. Who couldn’t relate to that?

“I remember loving the humor, thinking she is so funny,” Levine continues, “and thinking that here’s a rare range of talents in a writer: somebody who can engage me emotionally and yet who can make me laugh. And whose plot is really driving me forward.”

Levine makes the point that it was a tremendous advantage for Rowling to have lived with her characters for so long between the time she conceived of Harry (1990) and the time the first book was published in England (June 1997).

“She was building the rest of the story, figuring out the whole arc of Harry’s experience,” he says. It was only after Levine himself finished the final book that he fully understood “how carefully and deliberately and subtly all the clues and pieces of information have been placed and built from one book to the next.”

He was as surprised as any ordinary fan, he says, by plot and character developments as they arose. Which is exactly how he and Rowling wanted it.

Levine hopes and expects to edit Rowling again. Yet, his days without Harry make him smile, too. He’s got other authors to be excited about. One is Australian graphic novelist Shaun Tan, whose wordless narrative of immigration, The Arrival, he calls “an unbelievable book.”

Another is Irish writer Roddy Doyle, whose latest, “Wilderness,” is on Levine’s fall list.