When you're interviewing the man who brought Harry Potter to American readers, your first duty is to apologize for asking a question he's probably answered so many times it will make his eyes glaze over.

Your second duty is to ask it anyway: Could he tell the story of how he discovered the book of the decade?

No surprise, the man whose name is on the spine of every one of 103 million Harry Potter books in print in America sighs. And it seems as if he'd rather walk through a forest of Whomping Willows than trudge through that old yarn again.

"Talk about your glazed eyes," Arthur A. Levine says. "I've told that story a billion times."

Levine, 43, is vice president of Arthur A. Levine Books, the Scholastic imprint that releases the Harry Potter series for American readers. (The book was first published in England by Bloomsbury, and has since been published in at least 200 countries.)

At the recent Book Expo America, the industry convention held this year in New York, Levine sat down for a brief interview - and, yes, even answered the dreaded question that's dogged him since Harry took off for the stratosphere on his rocket-powered broomstick.

Levine was at the Bologna International Children's Book Fair at the time. Charged with starting his own imprint for Scholastic, he was shopping around for books to publish that would "stand the test of time, like the kind of books I loved as a child."

In a meeting, Bloomsbury officials noted that they had one book that fit that description.

"They said, 'We haven't published it yet, don't even control the rights' " but they gave Levine a manuscript of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone nonetheless. The editor read it on the plane ride home, offered $105,000 for the American rights, a jaw-dropping sum for a children's story - and the rest is reading history.

What did he see in the manuscript of a then-unknown author?

"I really felt I was in the hands of an exceptional writer. . . I remember having the feeling of just being swept away by the writing. It had an unusual combination of humor, storytelling, (great) characters."

Levine attributes the book's amazing success to the media attention it's attracted, due in part to the huge advance Scholastic paid for the book. Although most industry watchers will tell you that the book gained a grass-roots following before the media glare took hold, Levine disagrees.

"It's a really great book, but this is one people actually wrote about. I bet if you could get the media to pay sufficient attention to my other books, they might also get a large audience."

Levine works in conjunction with Bloomsbury's Emma Matthewson. Both read each Rowling manuscript before publication. "We both edit it and put our notes and thoughts together and jointly edit the book with Jo (Rowling)."

His role, he notes, is to be the "ideal reader."

"Before millions of readers get the book, she gets me and Emma. We give her our reactions all the way through, line by line, chapter by chapter: This is how it feels, this is how I'm reacting - is this what you want? She gets to decide, 'Yes, that's exactly what I want the reader to feel' or 'No, that's not what I was after.' "

They also check for consistency in plot details. As any Potter fan knows, those are legion.

"We have a bible of characters and spells, how everything is rendered on the page. If a spell is written in italics and caps and it's spelled this way, from Book 2 to Book 6 it has to come out that way. We're helping her maintain her own rules of magic. If I say Spell X and water freezes in Book 5, and then say Spell X and water boils (in Book 6), we have to make a note of that. She's got a tremendous amount of detail in her head, but she's only human and a lot of readers will read it 25 times."

Levine has watched Harry grow from an awkward 11-year-old, uncertain of his own powers, to a confident adolescent who has stood up to the most evil force in his world. That's one of the interesting changes Levine's witnessed in Rowling's stories through the years.

"When you live with kids every day, they don't seem to be changing, but if you look at a picture from last year, it's wow, it's incredible how much they've grown. He's not the same kid he was as an 11-year-old."

As for Levine, well, he hasn't changed quite as drastically as the character that has made millions for its publisher and author. I ask Levine if discovering Harry has changed his life in any way.

He scoffs at the notion.

"Not at all. Having a child has changed my life, but editing a wonderful book? That's what I've been doing and I'm really, really happy for it, but that doesn't mean it's changed my life. I'm sure it's changed J.K. Rowling's life. Even then, she'd probably argue that it hasn't changed it in the ways that are truly important: friends and family and health."

Well, then, has it changed his career? No, again. "I'm in the same place in my career as I was eight years ago. I had my own imprint in 1996 with Scholastic, and that's where I am today. Before that, I was the guy who had edited Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, or Officer Buckle and Gloria (by Peggy Rathmann). In publishing, if you continue to have success, your publisher continues to trust you. It has been helpful in keeping me employed, but I like to feel I would be employed anyway."

With that, our time is up. Another interviewer is waiting - no doubt ready with the question Levine has answered a billion times.

Er, make that a billion and one.

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