After getting to the top of the queue, all some wanted to do was race to the secret at the end of the book. Emerging from the Piccadilly branch of Waterstone's in London, a few minutes after midnight, Tracey Ruck, 32, from west Hampstead, was holding a trembling hand to her face as she made the 10 shaky steps from the till to the door.
She had turned immediately to the back page. "I read the end," she quivered. "I know who died. I'm going home to recover."
Savannah Mazda, 13, was one of a group of four friends from south London who were the first to get their hands on the book. They were persuaded to scream on cue for the scores of camera crews as they held the fat yellow hardbacks aloft, turning to each other, and screaming again.
"I feel absolutely ecstatic," Savannah said. "I just ran over to the desk like it was the finishing line, and said 'please, please, take my money'."
First to arrive, 8 hours too early, was Amy Goudge, 13, from Toronto, accompanied by her mother, Reva Devins. Wasn't there any way they could get hold of a copy in Canada?
The staff at Waterstone's were smiling, but unmoved. In the background, two security men, who had spent the after noon gamely posing for photographers and TV crews, leaned heavily on a pallet loaded with plain brown boxes, distinguished only by white tape reading "embargoed stock", and pushed it into a locked storage cupboard.
Last night, expectation had reached levels of barely suppressed hysteria as millions of young fans worldwide breathlessly awaited the publication of the first new Harry Potter novel for three years. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the fifth novel in JK Rowling's series about the young orphan magician. Its artfully stage-managed release, at midnight last night in the UK and across the world, was an event to make the term "publishing phenomenon" seem inadequate.
Seven and a half hours before the doors opened a queue of hyperventilating schoolgirls was already thronging around the shop door. "We've been waiting for three years and we can't wait any longer," explained Savannah, who had come straight from school, along with her friends, all dressed in witches' hats and Hogwarts academic gowns, clutching well-worn copies of earlier books from the series.
"Plus, I was determined to get it eight hours before my brother!" chipped in Suzanna Dickson, also 13.
Hundreds of booksellers and supermarkets opened their doors at midnight and hosted specially themed Potter evenings to cash in on a release which is expected to swamp all previous records. The fourth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, became the fastest-selling book of all time in its first weekend of publication in July 2000. The online bookseller Amazon said yesterday that advance reservations for the Order of the Phoenix, at 400,000 in the UK alone, were six times the numbers received for the previous volume. WH Smith, Britain's largest bookseller, announced 280,000 pre-orders, also a sixfold increase.
"This is certainly the biggest event we have ever been involved with," said Gavin Pilgrim, deputy manager of Waterstone's Piccadilly, the largest bookstore in Europe. Staff from head office and other stores had been roped in to help out on the tills, he said. Upstairs, 60 people were engaged in building a replica of the fictitious platform 9 at King's Cross station, where Harry Potter catches the train to his boarding school, Hogwarts.
The real King's Cross, meanwhile, had been hired by WH Smith, which laid on interactive games and prizes for eager young Potter fans with, they hoped, pennies in their pockets.
More than 350 Tesco stores across Britain opened at one minute past midnight, the time the embargo was officially lifted, to cater for demand which the supermarket giant put in excess of 750,000 sales. Some 140 outlets of WH Smith, 97 Waterstone's shops and 67 branches of the specialist chain Ottakar's also opened their doors at midnight. Many hosted special Potter-themed sleepovers, midnight feasts and fancy dress parties.
The excitement among fans and the retailers is not confined to the UK; Magrudy's bookshop in Dubai is today putting on games of floor chess, count the beans and guess the name of the dragon, while shoppers at the Feltrinelli store in Padua, Italy, can have tea with three witches invited for the occasion.
"We have never seen anything approaching the scale of this in recent history of general publishing," said Nicholas Clee, editor of the publishing industry magazine, the Bookseller, yesterday.
"It will certainly be the fastest-selling work of fiction since they started keeping records on this kind of thing."
Bloomsbury, the book's publishers, was yesterday coy about the number of books it expected to sell overnight, but it confirmed that advance orders were larger than for any previous book in the series, which Rowling has said will run to seven volumes. It led the once-struggling publisher to predict that its profits for 2003 would be "not less than £15m".
But the publisher's modesty conceals a masterful public relations blitz that has seen media outlets scramble to win interviews with the author and raised the book's release to the status of an international event. In a number of carefully choreographed interviews over the past week, Rowling has dangled some tantalising hints about the book's contents in front of her young readers. Harry, no longer the cutesome prepubescent boy first introduced to readers in 1997, is now a stroppy, hormonal 15-year-old adolescent; the author revealed that he spent much of the latest book "very, very angry", but that she had at least permitted him "a relationship, of sorts". She also revealed that she had killed off one of the book's central characters, a decision which, she said, had reduced her to tears.
By 11.50pm last night things were getting ugly. Mothers in the crush outside the Piccadilly branch of Waterstone's bookshop were screaming at other mothers: "No, you were NOT in the queue eight hours ago. We were in the queue eight hours ago."
Inside, photographers and camera crews unhappy at the roped off positions they had been assigned were screaming at PRs, as the long, long queue, vastly boosted after pub chucking out time and stretching for more than 300 metres along Piccadilly, screamed at every passing car that tooted.
