WHO changed Philosopher's to Sorcerer's and WHY?

[Dan Delaney]

No: HPFGUIDX 55909

The sub-thread in the "What is Canon?" thread a week ago got me 
thinking about the "Sorcerer" vs. "Philosopher" thing. I haven't ever 
seen a suitable explanation for why this word-switch occurred. Many 
quick explanations have been thrown out, such as: "it was believed 
American children would not know what a Philosopher was", or "the 
publishers thought that those of us in the U.S. wouldn't "get it" ", or 
"they thought that U.S. audiences would be turned off by the word 
"Philosopher's" because it was too dull or something", or my favorite 
:-), from Katy: "It's like that because of the differences of the 
English language in the US as opposed to English in England." (Excuse 
me...HAHAHAHAHA...ahem, sorry. Being someone who got his degree in 
philosophy here in the U.S., I can tell you that not one time in any of 
the many philosophy classes I attended was the word "sorcery" used in 
place of "philosophy".)

What I want to know is, WHO WAS IT at Scholastic who thought that U.S. 
kids would be turned off by the word "Philosopher" in the title and 
that changing it to "Sorcerer" would sell more books? I WANT NAMES :-). 
And WHAT WAS THEIR RATIONALE? Did they have any demographic research 
for this opinion? Obviously the word Philosopher hadn't hurt sales in 
other parts of the world, so why did they think that it would be a 
problem in the U.S.? And considering that the books sell just fine in 
Britain, Canada, Australia, etc. with the original title, do they still 
think that they made the right decision? Has anyone ever interviewed 
the people at Scholastic to get answers to these questions?

My opinion is that it was a baseless decision on the part of someone 
there at Scholastic because book sellers and movie producers here in 
the U.S. (maybe they're like this elsewhere too) are convinced that a 
book or movie has to sound exciting and action-packed to be successful 
and that if it doesn't have a bunch of explosions and blood and gore, 
then it won't sell. "Sorcerer", after all, sound a lot more exciting 
than "Philosopher". But I think Kathryn's analogy of changing "Holy 
Grail" to "Magical Grail" is an excellent point. It was simply wrong to 
change "Philosopher's Stone" to "Sorcerer's Stone", and it's sad that 
the U.S. readers are stuck with such marketing stupidity. And as she 
pointed out, "...the implication [is] that American kids are somehow 
more easily bored or more stupid than the rest of the English-speaking 
world, all of whom coped perfectly well with the word Philosopher."

Cheers.
--Dan