Harry Potter and the Serbian Snarl

This is less an investigation and more of a record. There’s nothing startling or particularly new—it just took quite a lot of effort to sort out and I don’t want to forget it.

The Serbian Harry Potter books are a bit of a nightmare, particularly for completionists—it took years for a complete set of books to be published by the same publisher!

The biggest barrier to tracing the history of these books in this language is the publisher-turnover! The Internet Archive is the only reason I made any progress at all.

Narodna Kniga was the first publisher of Harry Potter in Serbian—they published PS and COS in Cyrillic (without ISBN’s):

But Narodna Kniga kept changing their name around—I wasn’t able to figure out why but I’m guess because of varying partnerships or ownerships. At any rate, they were variously known as “Narodna Knjiga”, “Narodna Knjiga—Alfa”, “Alfa—Narodna Knjiga” and “Politka Narodna Knjiga’.

The next books they published was a Latin edition of POA and GOF in 2001.

And then Latin editions of OTP in 2003 and HBP in 2005:

In 2005, they also started publishing the highly sought-after “Lemony Snicket” Cyrillic editions of PS though OTP (only PS included) in 2005:

Around that time Narodna Knjiga seems to have gone under, probably accounting for why we never got HBP and DH Lemony Snickets.

In 2007/2008, Evro-Giunti picked up the publications, seemingly in particular because there was no Serbian DH, which was released in late December 2007 (according to their release notes; however, mostly the book is reported to be published in 2008. They released all the books in Latin.

However, Evro-Giunti then morphed in Evro Book which continued publishing in to at least 2019 when the published the illustrated GOF. The books seem to be randomly found with either imprint on the front cover. I’m going to guess just because of timing of reprint runs. All of their books are in Latin.

Evro Book dissolved sometime before 2022 when Čarobna Knjiga took over and and republished everything with Duddle Art. They also started publishing the Hogwarts Library including the illustrated editions.