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Harry Potter and the ring of steel around book's American launch
By Charles Laurence in New York
(Filed: 10/07/2005)

A wizard's wand might do the trick in the right hands, but the tools needed by American booksellers for the biggest event in their history will be bolt-cutters and crowbars.



Such is the obsessive secrecy of next week's Harry Potter launch that J K Rowling's United States publishers, Scholastic, are stacking the books in steel container lorries and delivering them to retailers chained up like Houdini, the escape artist of a previous era.

It is the only way that Scholastic could think of to ensure the safe delivery of 10.8 million copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - a record figure for a hardback first edition.

It printed 8.5 million copies for the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, woefully underestimating demand.

The bolt-cutters will be needed at the stroke of midnight on Friday when the book, the sixth in the series, is published.

Around the world, anxious fans must wait for British clocks to strike 12.01am on July 16, when Rowling will start reading the book to children in Edinburgh, before they can get their hands on a copy.

Until then, the millions of books, tantalisingly sealed in thick, black plastic on industrial pallets are under strict embargo.

The crates stacked up in the warehouses of delivery companies across America are marked: Please Do Not Open Before Midnight.

As a final layer of security, booksellers have been forced to sign legal forms acknowledging that if they break the embargo, they will never again be supplied with a book by Scholastic.

Ronald Smith, a lorry driver, revealed that he had been ordered to drive his precious cargo non-stop on a 10-hour journey last week between a printer in Harri sonburg, Virginia, and the Chapter 11 bookstore warehouse in Atlanta, Georgia.

His truck was even fitted with a global positioning system to enable a satellite to monitor his progress and check that he did not deviate or stop.

More than 5,000 American bookshops are planning midnight parties. Scholastic is closing Mercer Street in New York's fashionable Soho district for a party, renaming it Harry Potter Place with City Hall's permission.

Booksellers expect most of the 10.8 million American copies to be sold within 24 hours. Amazon, the internet bookseller, had taken 771,000 advanced orders with two weeks still to go, while Barnes & Noble, the country's biggest chain, expects a million advance orders and a million bookshop sales on the first day.

"No book has ever sold so many copies in so little time. We'll sell 50,000 copies an hour - less than one per cent of books sell 50,000 copies in their lifetime," said Steve Riggio, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble.

Last week, Amazon announced that Rowling, who according to Forbes is worth $1 billion (£572 million), has broken yet another record: she has sold more books than any other author in the 10 years since Amazon launched its online bookselling business. Shakespeare was in 26th place.

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Andy Borowitz: Man Commits Suicide after Learning Harry Potter Spoiler
'I No Longer Have a Reason to Live,' Says Despondent Potter Fan
By: Andy Borowitz
Published: Jul 8, 2005 at 07:41
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A rabid Harry Potter fan took his life yesterday after inadvertently learning a plot spoiler from the soon-to-be-released J.K. Rowling opus, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince."

Jude Ralston, 32, of Hudson, Ohio left a suicide note indicating that since overhearing the plot spoiler at a shopping mall earlier in the day, "I no longer have a reason to live."

Family and friends who gathered for a candlelight memorial outside Mr. Ralston's house remembered a man who seemed to live only for Harry Potter – and wondered if they could have done anything to prevent his tragic fate.

"When Jude got that vanity license plate that said ‘Hogwarts,' that seemed harmless enough," said Polly Clovis, who attended Model U.N. with Mr. Ralston while the two were in high school. "But when he started wearing that wizard hat around town, we really should have seen that as a cry for help."

According to friends of Mr. Ralston, the Potter fanatic had done everything in his power to protect himself from stumbling across Potter plot spoilers, even disconnecting his computer from the Internet and avoiding his favorite vintage comic book store.

Ms. Clovis said that she hoped Mr. Ralston's death would cause federal authorities to tighten the flow of Harry Potter plot information to prevent similar tragedies from taking place.

"In my heart I believe that could have saved Jude's life, even if he didn't have one," she said.

Elsewhere, President Bush called the jailing of a New York Times reporter "a positive step," but warned that many other reporters were still at large.