Harry Potter Fans Crowd Bookstores for Series Finale

Bloomberg.com -- To get one of the first copies of the seventh and final Harry Potter book, 17-year-old Chellie Carr flew from Okemos, Michigan, to camp outside Waterstone's bookshop in London's Piccadilly, braving torrential rains and nosy drunks in a 36-hour wait.

"This is very symbolic of the end of my childhood,'' Carr said shortly before the book's midnight release. ``I grew up with Harry. I'm 17, Harry is 17,'' she said, sitting on the pavement in her suede cape and witch's hat. ``It's very sad. I don't know what I'm going to do in my spare time."

After leaks threatened one of the publishing industry's most extensive embargoes, Harry Potter fans flocked to bookstores to buy the last installment of J.K. Rowling's bestselling series about the boy wizard who befriended muggles, slew monster snakes and solemnly swore to be up to no good.

``Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'' went on sale today in Britain at 12:01 a.m. London time. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc declined to say how many millions of copies it had ordered for its initial print run. U.S. publisher Scholastic Corp. made the first of its 12 million copies available to eager buyers five hours later in New York, also at 12:01 a.m. local time.

Thousands of fans in London lined up for more than a dozen blocks to get copies at the laser-lit Waterstones store. Actors dressed as large furry creatures and witches in hats entertained the crowd before a loud countdown to the opening.

Readers

Aude Quinchon, a 20-year-old intern with Sotheby's in Paris, had left work, taken the train to London and joined two friends who had queued for 12 hours on her behalf. Quinchon, in a black Halloween hat fished from her cellar, said she won't be flipping to the last page to find out what happens to Harry.

``No, no, I can't!'' she said. ``I will never do that! I just want to take my time! As soon as I finish this interview, I will put on my iPod so I can hear no one.'' She admitted that the conclusion of the series was ``really, really sad, but it was time to end.''

In Melbourne, Australia, acrobats entertained with a game of Quidditch while hundreds of fans braved 3 degree Celsius temperatures (37 degrees Fahrenheit) until the stores opened 9:01 a.m. local time.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s Asda supermarket chain in the U.K. sold 250,000 copies, half of its inventory, between the midnight launch and 9 a.m. London time, spokesman Ed Watson said by mobile telephone. The retailer expected to sell out its entire supply by ``early afternoon'' today, he said.

W.H. Smith Plc, the U.K.'s largest magazine retailer, sold the book at a rate of 15 copies a second between midnight and 7 a.m., spokeswoman Sue Beaumont said by mobile telephone, declining to give an outright sales total.

`Well on Way'

Tesco Plc, the U.K.'s largest retailer, said in an e- mailed statement it was ``well on the way to hitting the 350,000 sales in the first 12 hours as predicted.'' Tesco spokesman Adam Fisher told Bloomberg that more than 300 of its stores across the U.K. had been selling the book since midnight.

Early shoppers in New Zealand, where sales started late- morning, got to wait inside. By the time the boxes opened, the queue in the Borders Group Inc. store in Wellington snaked into Lambton Quay.

``You really want to know what's going to happen. Will Voldemort triumph?'' said Emily Steel, 15, who arrived at dawn with friend Chloe Shallcross to be at the front of the queue.

Worried that favorite characters, Luna Lovegood and Ron Weasley may not survive, the pair are confident Harry Potter's popularity with school-age children will.

``Hogwarts is a school for wizards. And kids love magic,'' Steel said.

Singapore Readers

Singapore fans formed a line that ran the length of a city block at the Borders bookstore on Orchard Road, the main shopping strip, at 8:30 a.m. local time. The line was half as long by 9 a.m. The only people in costume at that time were the store clerks, who wore witch hats.

Tarang Agarwal, 18, said he waited for 90 minutes to buy his copy and plans to spend the day reading it.

``If I turn on my computer, there will be 20 people that tell me what happened, and I'd rather find out by myself,'' Agarwal said. ``Her writing has evolved. Her original fans were about 10 years old. Now her fans are about 18 years old. The stories have improved.''

Abhiroop Basu, 18, said buying the book was a good way to pass the time. ``I just didn't have anything to do this morning, other than sleeping,'' he said.

Amazon Orders

Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. received 2.25 million advance orders worldwide, up from 1.5 million for the previous novel in the series. Diehard fans would have done well to order online from DeepDiscount.com, whose distributor, Levy Home Entertainment, accidentally released about 1,200 copies as much as four days early.

Rowling read to 1,700 fans gathered inside the grand hall of London's Natural History Museum, where its towering dinosaur stands. Fans were pre-selected in an Internet competition to take part in the exclusive evening.

Embargo-busting reviews of the book appeared two days ago in the New York Times, which said it purchased a copy in a New York City store, and in the Baltimore Sun. Yesterday the entire novel was posted on the Internet and could be freely downloaded as a series of photographs of the pages.

In a statement released by Bloomsbury, Rowling said she was ``staggered'' by the purported spoilers, which showed ``complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children, who wanted to reach Harry's final destination by themselves, in their own time.''

Fans were equally livid.

Butterfly Wings

``Shame on them. They should be disgusted with themselves,'' said 23-year-old Anna Gallen, a barmaid from Wales who was No. 125 in the Piccadilly queue and wore butterfly wings for the occasion. ``I think it's wrong for people to come along and just ruin it for everybody else.''

When we last saw our hero in ``Harry Potter and the Half- Blood Prince,'' he had been crowned ``The Chosen One,'' the sole being capable of destroying ``He Who Must Not Be Named,'' aka the arch villain Lord Voldemort. Harry's quest, we learned, was to track down the four remaining Horcruxes -- lockets containing pieces of Voldemort's soul -- and slay the bum one last time.

It won't be an easy task, given Voldemort's prophecy that Harry will always be his own greatest enemy. Rowling has said two characters will die in the new book, and bookies were convinced that the boy with the lightning-bolt scar would be one of them.

William Hill Plc, a London-based bookmaker, was so sure of Harry's demise that on July 18 it stopped accepting wagers on who would snuff him. Harry Potter himself was the favorite at 2-5, with the Dark Lord, who murdered Harry's parents, the second-most-likely perpetrator at 9-4. The bookies were offering 8-1 odds on Rowling producing an eighth Harry Potter book before the end of 2008.

Hogwarts Express

The imagery in the previous book, ``Half-Blood Prince,'' was bleaker than ever. There was much blood and a lake filled with corpses. Harry himself was losing his intellectual drive: ``He felt no curiosity at all,'' Rowling wrote. ``He doubted that he would ever feel curious again.''

This disillusionment was compounded, for British readers, by events in London the very month that the sixth Harry Potter book was released: When the Hogwarts Express pulled out of King's Cross Station in London last time round, British readers remembered that this was the same terminus at which suicide bombers were photographed before launching the attacks that murdered 52 people on London's transport system on July 7, 2005.

Pakistani police today defused a bomb outside a crowded Karachi shopping center where the Harry Potter book was to be launched, after receiving a telephoned warning, Agence France- Presse reported.

Harried Mother

Author Rowling has come a long way since the early 1990s, when she was still a harried single mother scribbling the first Harry Potter novel in Edinburgh cafes while her daughter napped in a stroller at her side. Major London publishers rejected the manuscript, which Rowling eventually sold in 1996 to Bloomsbury, then an upstart independent publisher.

Bloomsbury had such modest hopes for ``Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'' that it ordered a first print run of just 500 copies. Early reviews were positive, though, and publicity generated by a lucrative U.S. deal with Scholastic boosted the book's slow-burning success.

Now Bloomsbury is preparing for the aftermath of the Harry Potter series, looking for acquisitions in the United States and Germany as it seeks to diversify its sources of profit. The company is also expanding its digital publishing unit. In April, it reported its first drop in annual profit in 12 years.

To Gallen, the butterfly-winged barmaid, the series is sure to be ``the new generation's `Lord of the Rings.'''

``It's a classic,'' she said, pausing to hoot at a passing posse of Potter fans. ``It will always be relevant, because it has such moral issues that it's a never-ending story.''

By Hephzibah Anderson and Farah Nayeri.