Potter guide author faces Rowling

A HARRY POTTER fan who wants to publish an encyclopedic guide to the fantasy novels broke down and cried on the witness stand yesterday as he faced off in federal court against his idol JK Rowling.

The British author sued Steven Vander Ark’s publisher RDR Books last year, claiming that their Harry Potter Lexicon infringed on her copyright.

Vander Ark wiped away tears when he was asked to reflect on what the case has done to his relationship with the community of Harry Potter fans. The former middle school librarian, who fell in love with the books in the late 1990s and has devoted years to studying them and indexing their content online, could barely speak.

“It’s been difficult because there has been a lot of criticism, obviously, and that was never the intention. This has been an important part of my life for the last nine years or so,” he said

Vander Ark testified on the second day of a trial in US District Court, pitting his publishing company, RDR Books, against Rowling and Warner Bros the maker of the Harry Potter films.

Rowling testified on Monday that the “inferior” Potter encyclopedia “is sloppy, lazy and that it takes my work wholesale, verbatim”.