But, according to insiders, the secrecy was less a matter of strategy than necessity. Until recently–April, by reliable accounts–the publishers were as in the dark about book four as the public.

"They had no idea what the plot was going to be until a month or so ago," said one British editor familiar with the goings-on at Bloomsbury, Harry Potter 's British publisher. "There was an awful lot of nervous tension over there. It's clever what they did with the publicity. They made a virtue out of what was a problem."

Several months before its July 8 publication date, booksellers were taking orders for J. K. Rowling's next book, Harry Potter and the Doomspell Tournament . And media outlets around the country goosed along enthusiasm by running pieces on everything from what kids could read while waiting for Doomspell to reasons why even adults liked the tales. Toss in impressive statistics–the first three books have sold almost 30 million copies and been published in 39 languages–and the appetite for the next Harry Potter only increased.

Then, in mid-May, The Doomspell Tournament vanished. In its place emerged Harry Potter IV and a shroud of secrecy around the book, its title and contents. Scholastic, which has listed the book by its Doomspell title in its catalog, contacted major booksellers and the media, informing them that the book would now be known simply as Harry Potter IV .

At that point the publishers–Bloomsbury in the U.K. and Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic in the U.S.–took the secrecy and ran with it. The reason? Ms. Rowling, they said, wished to make the best surprise possible for the children.

"Everyone is signing an agreement not to put the book on sale before July 8," said Sandra Leaf, a publicist for Raincoast Books in Ottawa, Bloomsbury's Canadian distributor. "Anyone who sees the book itself– proofreaders, layout editors–have had to sign a confidentiality agreement. There is a title, but it is a secret."

Raincoast Books publicity assistant Michelle Raadschelders added that the books were being guarded in a bonded warehouse until the release. "There are absolutely no advance copies. In the U.K., they said they wouldn't send out any media copies at all. We will send out media copies, but time it so that they do not arrive until the 8th or 9th. No one will have the book before the 8th, no one should know anything about it before then, unless a copy gets stolen. The warehouse has security guards, although we have no security on site."

But it's easy to keep a secret when there is nothing to hide. Emma Matthewson, Ms. Rowling's editor at Bloomsbury, confirmed to The Observer that the manuscript had come in late. "The manuscript was delivered at the end of February, which should not be taken as a normal schedule for publishing. Normally the manuscript is delivered a full 12 months in advance of the publishing date. This was very tight. We worked on it until the end of May. That includes all the major edits and rewrites right down to the details, copy editing, typesetting and so forth. It was very, very tight.

"I didn't get nervous," Ms. Matthewson continued. "I was always in constant communication with Jo and she would tell me how she was getting on. She would tell me, and I have complete trust in her."

But late February didn't sound too accurate to Ms. Rowling's American editor, Arthur A. Levine, who noted that he and Ms. Matthewson received the manuscript simultaneously. While still citing the end of May as the closing time for the manuscript, Mr. Levine recalled a much later date for submission. "Mid-April sounds about right," he said. "The later it got, the more pressure there was. We–Jo and I–are in regular contact, and she was under some pressure. She wanted to get this book right. It's a pivotal book. Her concern was to make sure she crafted her story just the right way. There's a pressure of expectation that didn't exist with the first book."

Mr. Levine's account of the production schedule would seem more in sync with the title's magical disappearance in mid-May. "I'm not exactly sure when we settled on a title. We discussed a few titles. It was recently. Everything happened very recently.... There may have been talk about it [delaying the book]."

Christopher Little, Ms. Rowling's literary agent, also recollected that his client turned in her manuscript "in April," although he did not specify when. He added, "The title came in virtually simultaneously to the time the book came in."

When questioned about the April date, Ms. Matthewson declined to comment.

Still, as short-lived as the Harry Potter secret was, it was well kept–until June 24, when the Sunday Telegraph reported the title of book four to be Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire . And on June 27, Scholastic Books confirmed that title for The Observer .

The Observer has also learned that a green and blue dragon adorns the dust jacket of the book's British version.

J.K. Rowling did not get to be the third-richest woman in the U.K. by happenstance. Consider her dealings with Random House Inc.'s Listening Library. When the audio-book publisher met with the author, the staff had to earn her trust before the first sentence of Harry's first tale could be recorded. "From the beginning, Ms. Rowling and her agent spent a fair amount of time reviewing some of the other work we had done so that she would have an acceptable comfort level with us," said Mary Beth Roche, the publicity director for the Listening Library.

And still Jim Dale, the actor hired by Listening Library, who created more than 125 different voices for book four alone, had to run all of his handiwork by the author.

"On one of the previous books, Jim wanted to do an Irish accent for one of the characters," Ms. Roche told The Observer . "[Ms. Rowling] wanted a Yorkshire accent, so Jim had to go back and re-record that voice."

This time, however, with the manuscript arriving so late, Random House could hardly afford delays. "This time, he would record during the day and check in with her each night."

According to Ms. Roche, Mr. Dale and the audio crew didn't get the manuscript until late May, working through Memorial Day weekend to ensure that the 20-and-a-half-hour recording would be ready for the July 8 release.

"She's just a perfectionist," said her editor, Emma Matthewson. "She wants to get everything absolutely right."

For nearly 80 weeks now, ever since Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone started appearing on The New York Times best-seller list, adult trade publishers have been standing quietly by, watching young Harry hopscotch all over the list.

No more. On July 23, The Times will cede that territory back to the grownups, launching a children's fiction best-seller list.

"That is an enormous relief to us all who were afraid we'd face five Harry Potter books at top of the best-seller list," said Time-Warner Trade Publishing Group chief Larry Kirshbaum. Asked how he thought the new list came to be spawned at the paper of record, he said, "There was a lot of intelligent lobbying going on. James Patterson [the thriller writer who is published by Time-Warner's Little, Brown imprint], for one, and some others wrote letters. I think The Times realized it was going to destroy their list. And with Barnes & Noble going to its own list, The Times is losing their franchise even more. A lot of people felt it was diluting the value of The New York Times best-seller list. The Times list and Oprah are the two foundations of our business right now, of the best-seller business."

Times Book Review editor Chip McGrath denied that grumblings from the publishing folks had made much difference. "The catalyzing event came last February when there were five kids' books on the best-sellers list, three of those being the first three Harry Potters.… That made a fully third of the list children's fiction. It seemed like a good moment to make the change."

Like Knicks seats and tables at Le Cirque, tickets to the Late Show with David Letterman have been a choice perk for select New York City law firms for a number of years. Firms secured blocks of seats from the Letterman staff and divvied them up among summer associates and assorted friends, and the happy suits trooped down to the frigid Ed Sullivan Theater, loosened their ties and yukked it up.

Apparently, the lawyers didn't yuk it up enough. Sources at a handful of New York law firms told NYTV that the Late Show has unofficially ceased its practice of handing out blocks of tickets to law firms. Their suspicion?

Them lawyers are just too damn dull.

CBS and Letterman's production company Worldwide Pants deny that there's an official Late Show lawyer lockout, but a source at the Manhattan firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler said that when the firm asked for tickets for a third consecutive summer, a member of audience coordinator David Kay's staff said that herds of lawyers were no longer welcome. According to the source, the Worldwide Pants staff member told him that show officials had concluded that lawyers are "boring" and "not great in a crowd."

"You're just not the kind of crowd we're looking for," the Letterman staff member said, according to the source.

Sources at other firms say they, too, have recently felt a cold shoulder from the Late Show . NYTV spoke to representatives of five firms which had received groups of tickets in the past, and only one managed to get seats for this summer. And that firm, Proskauer Rose, only got the coveted tickets after answering Letterman trivia and promising to laugh heartily. "[The show] said we needed to be avid David Letterman fans," said Ivy Kepner, associate programs coordinator for Proskauer Rose. "They called back to quiz us on the show. I, of course, watch all the time."

And lawyers aren't the only ones feeling left out in the cold at the Ed Sullivan Theater. Women, too, appear to be getting the squeeze from time to time. When a member of an all-male a cappella group at the Yale University inquired about Late Show tickets for his ensemble, a show staffer called to make certain that the group was, in fact, all-male. "They're really tight-ass about gender," said a group member, who asked to remain nameless. "When we reserved the tickets, [the show] stressed to me that they are for 20 guys ."

In fact, when the ensemble asked about bringing along some female companions, a Late Show staffer nixed that idea, the source said.

"I e-mailed [the show] a list of names of the audience members and the 20th name was of a girl," the group member said. "They called me back and told me the girl couldn't come."

Others confirmed the Late Show 's quirk. "They're very worried about the men-to-women balance," said the source from Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler. "Last year they told us we had too many women."

For those who are lucky enough to make it into the Late Show , precautions are taken to make sure they are good little audience members. "Last year they started using a marketing group," said the Patterson source. "They told us how to laugh, and how to scream."

A CBS publicist said there is no directive whatsoever to root anyone out of the Late Show audience. Publicist Kim Izzo said that, because Mr. Letterman missed more than a month of shows recovering from heart surgery, the Late Show hasn't been able to accommodate some groups that had received tickets in the past. "Because Dave was out for five weeks, we've had thousands of people we have had to reschedule," Ms. Izzo said.

But maybe the boring lawyers really were the problem. Though all the fuss about Mr. Letterman's heart certainly helped, the Late Show's ratings have jumped 16 per cent this season.

Tonight on the lawyer-free Late Show, Dana Carvey and No Doubt. [WCBS, 2, 11:35 p.m.]

Thursday, June 22

Media watchdog and former 20/20 producer Danny Schechter is in a huff about the Emmy Awards. A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Schechter, now helming the media criticism site mediachannel.org, found himself holed up in a New York hotel room with five other journalist types judging the Emmy Awards' news and documentary category. He was horrified not only by the crappiness of many of the Emmy nominees, but also by the judging process itself.

Mr. Schechter's main beef was that there were far too many Emmy nominees–some 62 segments, he said, making it nearly impossible for the judges to view them all. As a result, Mr. Schechter said, officials from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which runs the Emmy process, told the judges that they didn't have to watch the nominees in their entirety.

"They said because of the proliferation [of segments], it's okay if you look at 25 percent [of each]," Mr. Schechter said. "A little at the beginning, a little in the middle, a little in the end. As a producer of segments like this, I'm wondering if my own segments were judged in this way."

The judges were asked to grade the segments on a 1-to-5 scale, with 1 being Emmy-worthy and 5 being a piece of junk. The Emmys will be awarded according to Mr. Schechter, they watched a lot of junk. Mr. Schechter said the judges fast-forwarded through a number of segments and still didn't finish looking at all the nominees. He said the category is overloaded, since segments now come from network newsmagazine shows like 60 Minutes and Dateline NBC , as well as from cable outlets like CNN and syndicated fare like Inside Edition . "By the time the afternoon was coming on, we were just whizzing through these things, you know–'I've seen enough, next!'–that kind of thing," Mr. Schechter said.

In a written statement, NATAS director of news and documentary Jim Plante said that because of logistical problems, including the late arrival of equipment at the hotel, Mr. Schechter's panel was delayed by an hour and a half. He apologized for the delay, and said that the panel has been given more time to complete its judging of the category.

"As for Mr. Schechter's other comments, we're always interested in our judges' opinions and they will be duly noted," Mr. Plante said in his statement.

Even if the judging process wasn't pristine, Mr. Schechter sounded even more depressed about the overall quality of the segments. "A lot these things are not really investigative reporting," he said. While some segments were good, the sameness of the material was disturbing, and Mr. Schechter opined that there were a number of so-called newsmagazine investigative pieces that simply lifted the work of other news organizations or independent watchdog groups. "These people do the whole investigation for you, basically," he said.

As for the Emmys, Mr. Schechter wondered if the big business of awards shows was getting to be more important than the process. "Has the awards business gotten out of control?" he asked.

Tonight on ESPN, the beyond-reproach World's Strongest Man Competition . Try to watch more than 25 percent of it! [ESPN, 28, 8 p.m.]

Friday, June 23

Tonight's Walt Disney World's Summer Jam Concert features Christina Aguilera, Enrique Iglesias and Smash Mouth. Hope the guy working the DAT player is getting paid overtime for this gig. [WABC, 7, 8 p.m.]

Saturday, June 25

CBS admits it screwed up when it ran the mob drama Falcone for eight consecutive nights earlier this spring. To make up for this mistake, it is now running Falcone at 10 p.m. on Saturday nights, a time slot akin to entering the Witness Relocation program. [WCBS, 2, 10 p.m.]

Sunday, June 25

Will Bobby Flay slay? Or will Bobby Flay get filleted?

You'll have to tune in to tonight's premiere of Iron Chef NY Battle to find out. Mr. Flay, the energetic Mesa Grill chef and Food Network personality, was hand-picked to represent the Manhattan cuisine world on the English-dubbed and cultishly popular Japanese cooking show, in which renowned chefs compete against each other to be crowned with the title of Iron Chef. In a competition taped earlier this year before a noisy audience at Webster Hall, Mr. Flay competed against fabled Iron Chef warrior Morimoto.

Does Mr. Flay win? We're not supposed to say, since the Food Network is mounting a Crying Game -style campaign for the campy show, begging TV writers not to reveal the final result. We're not even supposed to tell you the secret ingredient! (All Iron Chef competitions feature a secret ingredient that becomes the basis for a series of dishes judged by a panel of experts.)

We can tell you this, however: This is a particularly violent installment of Iron Chef ! During the Iron Chef NY Battle , Mr. Flay cuts his finger really badly, and he even gets electrocuted!

"It is the wildest thing I have ever done," Mr. Flay said. "It [ Iron Chef ] is basically like the World Wrestling Federation meets the Food Network."

You can't really tell on the tape, but Mr. Flay said he severely cut his finger five minutes into the competition when he reached to grab the blade of his food processor. Yeeooow! The gash was so bad he had to wrap his bloody injured hand in a towel and try to make do with his other paw.

Twenty minutes later, as a pool of water collected at his feet, Mr. Flay got zapped with a jolting surge of electricity when he grabbed a ladle and placed his hand on a stainless steel countertop. "At first I thought that I had cut like a tendon in my finger or something, because electricity went right through my cut hand," Mr. Flay said. "I said, 'What the fuck is that?' and then I realized I was getting shocked. It was really killing me."

Indeed, Iron Chef NY Battle is a brutal competition. The contestants get only two assistants, and must compete against the clock in preparing their dishes. The chefs must also deal with a raucous crowd, cameras, noise and daffy host Gordon Elliott.

Next to the bouncy Mr. Flay, the somber Morimoto was kind of a hard-ass. When Mr. Flay jumped up on his cutting table at the end of the competition, Morimoto grumbled that Mr. Flay was disrespecting the sacred art of cooking, or something like that. Asked about Morimoto, Mr. Flay replied: "Whatever. You know what I mean? I guess he wasn't happy with the fact that we kind of stole his thunder at the end. It was showtime, let's face it. I get to cook seriously every night of my life, so when the camera goes on, why not entertain?"

Food Network executive Eileen Opatut said that Iron Chef is the network's second-highest-rated show, right after Emeril Lagasse Live . "I knew one of two things," she said. "I knew either it would be enormously successful, or it would be a tremendous failure."

And as if tonight's Iron Chef spectacle couldn't get any weirder, Iron First Lady of the City Donna Hanover is one of the judges. Rudy must have been dining with Judi that night. [FOOD, 50, 9 p.m.]

Monday, June 26

One of the oddest TV ad campaigns in recent memory is the one for drugstore.com, an online pharmaceutical company affiliated with Amazon.com. The ads featured a gabby red-haired woman dispensing motherly health advice to friends and family from the comfort of an enormous porcelain bubble bath.

Turns out that the actress who starred in the ads, Nia Vardalos, got more than a paycheck for her bathtub star turn. A source familiar with the commercial production said that Ms. Vardalos also developed a yucky rash after spending all that time in the tub for the cameras. Sounds like she could have used a few pharmacy products herself!

Ms. Vardalos' representative, Rick Siegel, confirmed that his client did indeed come down with a rash after the taping, but he said that the production company in charge of the shoot took care of all of her medical expenses immediately, and that there are no hard feelings whatsoever. "I certainly don't want anyone to think that we have anything that we feel bad about in regards to this, because the truth of it is we were very grateful for her to be part of it, and they have been nothing but terrific, beforehand, during it and after," Mr. Siegel said. Splish, splash!

Tonight on the Discovery Channel, The Deadliest Job in the World. Commercial acting? No, salmon fishing! [DSC, 18, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday, June 26

On Comedy Central tonight, the overlooked Bergman classic, Booty Call . [COM, 45, 8 p.m.]