A few seconds past the wizarding hour of midnight last Saturday, the most annoying and unnecessary marketing campaign in publishing history finally delivered the goods. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic Press; 734 pages; $25.95) would have sold millions of copies had its U.S. and British publishers simply dumped them in bookstores, unannounced, and then got out of the way as word of mouth spread among stampeding Pottermaniacs. That is pretty much the way the first three books about the boy wizard so phenomenally caught fire among young readers and then their parents and...
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