It had to happen sometime — and, lo, an era has ended. After a 10-year run, and less than a year after the seventh and final book in J. K. Rowling’s series was published, the Harry Potter books have fallen — as of the May 11 issue of the Book Review, which went to press last night — off The Times’s best-seller list.

Rowling and this publication’s sales rankings have a long and sometimes tangled history. The first book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” crept quietly onto the bottom of the hardcover fiction list on Dec. 27, 1998. (How far back was that? Eight days earlier, Bill Clinton had been impeached by the House of Representatives.) Within a year and a half, however, Pottermania was in full bloom; the top three places on the hardcover fiction list were held by Rowling titles, and a fourth Potter book was on the way.

The Book Review made the decision — controversial at the time — to start a separate children’s best-­seller list. “The time has come,” said Charles McGrath, then the Book Review’s editor, “when we need to clear some room.” Most publishers and booksellers welcomed the change, because the Potter phenomenon was keeping new titles off the fiction list. Some observers, though, felt Rowling was unfairly evicted — after all, they pointed out, adults read her books too.

The children’s list was not the only change Rowling brought to the Times best sellers. In 2004, with Potter titles now clogging the children’s list, the Book Review introduced yet another list — this one, for children’s “series” books, ignored the sales of individual titles and instead tracked each series as a whole. Rowling’s books were deposited there. The best-seller list may now be Rowling­-free, but one does not worry overly much for her. The seven books in the Potter series have sold some 375 million copies; they’ve been translated into 65 languages. And her books are sure to appear again on the list — almost certainly in November, when the sixth Potter film, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” arrives in theaters.

Among the critics to review Harry Potter novels in the Book Review have been Stephen King, John Leonard and Christopher Hitchens. The first book in the series, though, was reviewed by the Times reporter Michael Winerip. His ringing endorsement of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” began this way: “So many of the beloved heroes and heroines of children’s literature — from Cinderella and Snow White to Oliver Twist and the Little Princess to Matilda, Maniac Magee and the Great Gilly Hopkins — begin their lives being raised by monstrously wicked, clueless adults, too stupid to see what we the readers know practically from Page 1: This is a terrific person we’d love to have for a best friend. And so it is with Harry Potter, the star of ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,’ by J. K. Rowling, a wonderful first novel from England.” Winerip’s review ended thus: Like Potter, Rowling “had wizardry inside, and has soared beyond her modest Muggle surroundings to achieve something quite special.”