London – At midnight, like magic, Harry Potter appeared.
Like castles lowering their drawbridges, bookstores across Britain and as far away as Singapore and Sydney unveiled their copies of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final volume of the young wizard’s adventures.
Eager readers, many of whom had lined up for hours, rushed from the checkout registers, opening the thick hardback book to take in the opening words: “The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane.”
Inside were answers readers have waited long to learn – and that J.K. Rowling and her publishers have labored, with mixed results, to keep secret.
After obtaining a copy at a Singapore bookstore, Adela Lim, 16, flipped to the end of the book, scanned the text furiously and exclaimed to friends, “Oh my god!”
“I am aghast at the ending,” she said. “I’ve waited since the first book all the way until now, so I can’t wait anymore, I just want to find out the ending.”
Shops throughout the world were putting the book on sale at the same time – a minute past midnight British time (5:01 p.m. MDT Friday). Readers in the United States had to wait until midnight in each time zone, from 12:01 a.m. Saturday.
Rowling, who a decade ago introduced her magical character, was giving a midnight reading to 500 competition-winning children in the grand Victorian surroundings of London’s Natural History Museum. She sat in a large wing-backed chair and read the opening pages.
Potter enthusiasts, some rereading previous volumes, lined up outside bookstores in Los Angeles. In New York, a clock outside a Barnes & Noble store counted down to the midnight launch, publishing’s version of a trip to the moon.
Security for the launch was fist-tight, with books shipped in sealed pallets and legal contracts binding stores not to sell the book before the midnight release time.
But despite pleas from Rowling and fan sites, spoilers sprouted on the Internet in the days before the release, including photographed images of what turned out to be all 700-plus pages of the book’s U.S. edition. In France, the daily Le Parisien revealed how the final installment ends, in a small article it printed upside down.
