Potter fever at midnight hour (From Stroud News and Journal)

Potter fever at midnight hour

LEGIONS of Potter fans queued outside Stroud Children's Bookshop on Friday night to secure one of the first copies of the boy wizard's latest adventure.

Staff had planned to open the shop for an hour at midnight but ended up selling books until nearly 2am due to the sheer volume of enthusiasts keen to get their hands on the book.

The queue, which numbered 30 or so at 11.30pm, swelled rapidly at the stroke of 12 to approximately 400 people, enough to pass Iceland and it didn't seem to move for nearly an hour. A policeman turned up and mooched around for a little while, before leaving with a wistful sigh of: "Wish I'd thought of Harry Potter."

Only one passer by, clearly a little the worse for wear, denounced the queuing masses as "sad" but nobody paid her much attention. They just kept queuing and chattering amiably about whether Lord of the Rings was really a better book or not and who dies in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. There were children dressed in wizard's robes, mothers with Potter scars painted on their foreheads, grandparents and A Level students.

Andrew Penrith, the last person in the queue said: "Harry Potter's much more interesting than Club Splash." "We ran up here to get a copy. We told the bouncers we'd be five minutes. They probably won't let us back in now."

There was even a stall selling crisps and lemonade but no Chocolate Frogs or Every Flavour Beans. The bookshop's credit card machine went down at 12.45am and a flurry of parents had to dash for cashpoints , worrying audibly that the shop might close in their absence.

Bookshop owner Charles Tongue finally closed the doors in the small hours of Saturday morning after serving everyone who had waited.

"We were amazed and almost overwhelmed at times," he said. "We must have sold nearly 300 copies of The Order of the Phoenix tonight.

Shop manager Barbara Clarke said: "It was a very jolly event with a really nice atmosphere."

"I've never seen anything like this before.

"The last book was very popular but this one was even more so because of the gap of three years."

Interest in the book had not abated by the morning - a further 500 copies were sold during ordinary opening hours on Saturday.