Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson

the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week we're leafing through some of the books from the past which have shaped our world.

From Chairman Mao's Little Red Book,

At least a billion copies were published in Chinese. At that time the population of the

entire world is about three and a half billion people. So a billion copies is really quite a lot.

To the Book of Rules for Modern Dating and the groundbreaking feminist Fear of Flying.

Fear of Flying is a book about a woman trying to know herself. Know herself sexually,

know herself as a Jew, know herself as a woman. Those books plus more coming up later in the podcast.

Each in their own way has had an impact not just on their readers but on the world around them.

And for Chapter 1, we're going back to 1996 and a moment which changed the global landscape of the publishing industry itself.

In that year, after many rejections, an unknown author called JK Rolling, at last found a publisher for her first Harry Potter novel.

Louise Hidalgo has been speaking to the literary editor Barry Cunningham,

who spotted the boy wizard's potential and in doing so helped create a global phenomenon.

It's a rainy August night in London in 1996 when publisher Barry Cunningham receives a manuscript wrapped in a brown paper bag.

I didn't know of course it had been turned down by 22 or something other publishers. And I started reading it.

It was a rainy night and so I wasn't going out.

And I read the first two chapters.

And people often say, how much do you have to read

before you know something's good?

Actually, I think you know after two or three chapters and

and I was just gripped. I was gripped by Harry's situation and I gave the

...