As the clock struck midnight, the overexcited "muggles" smiled with glee. They had it. The new Harry Potter. Hyped as the publishing event of the century, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was snapped up by children and adults as soon as it hit the shops.
The muggles - Potter language for a normal mortal, as opposed to someone with magic powers - queued at bookshops or attended special sleepover parties to get their hands on the fourth book in the phenomenally successful series about a boy wizard.
Others lingered near the letterbox waiting for the arrival of the 640-page book by mail after preordering it on the web. Amazon, the internet bookseller, sold 400,000 copies of the book. Staff at the company's distribution centre in Milton Keynes worked through the night to ensure that copies were posted out yesterday. The company estimates that it will be supplying a copy of the book to one in every 150 children between five and 14 in the UK and says it will send 53 tonnes, or 41.6m pages, of the book to British readers.
Some stores did not open at midnight, arguing that this was not a time for children to be up. A spokesperson for WH Smith said its shops would not open in the middle of the night but the opening hour this morning was at the individual store manager's discretion. She said: "We have got an ethical issue with children being up at that time of night."
The stores would, like most others, be holding events throughout today - wizards, magicians and face painters are in big demand. This morning at 11.27am a steam train will leave Kings Cross station bound for the Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry. The train, decked out as the Hogwarts Express, will actually take the book's author, JK Rowling, on a book tour which will end up in Scotland.
Ms Rowling, who earned £14.5m last year in royalties, advances and film rights, plans to write seven books in the series and plotted each of the stories before writing the first book. In an interview in today's Guardian, she said she really would make the seventh the last Harry book but she would most likely go on writing. She said: "Yes, I'll still write. But I really mean this. I think it's quite possible that I'll finish Harry and go to the filing cabinet where the notes are and think it's rubbish."
The plot of the new book has remained a closely guarded secret, with Ms Rowling only revealing that someone very close to Harry dies.
It was not all good news for the Edinburgh-based author yesterday. Shortlisted for the Library Association's Carnegie Medal, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was not even commended by the judges. The prize went to Postcards From No Man's Land by Aidan Chambers, a book which deals with real-life issues such as adultery, euthanasia and homosexuality.
The book weaves together the story of 17-year-old Jacob's experiences in modern day Amsterdam and the experiences of a dying Dutch woman, Geertrui, who recalls her love for a married English soldier during the second world war, examining the values of the two eras.
