June 20, 2003	Friday	Rabi-us-Sani 19, 1424

LONDON: Bookshops across the world are bracing for a weekend frenzy with millions of readers awaiting the witching hour when the fifth volume of the epic tale of the boy wizard Harry Potter is finally published.

The long wait ends at midnight here on Friday (2300 GMT) when bookstores across the globe will be able to throw open their doors to an onslaught of readers who have made “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” a high-flying bestseller before it has even hit the shelves.

Retailers from Hong Kong to Stockholm are poised for the rush of shoppers, some of whom are planning to queue for hours in advance eager to snap up a first copy of J. K. Rowling’s 800-page tome. Parties, and some special offers, are planned from the earliest hours of Saturday, although months of savvy global promotion and runaway advance sales have already ensured “Phoenix” will be the biggest book launch in history.

W.H. Smith, one of Britain’s biggest book retailers, is to recreate the gateway to Platform 9-3/4 — the magical train stop for the Hogwarts Express which carries Harry and his friends to the Hogwarts School of Wizardry — at King’s Cross Station in central London.

Across the Channel, Paris’s two main English-language bookstores W.H. Smith and Brentano’s, will be holding “wizard” evenings, and begin sales at 1:00 am (2300 GMT).

Sweden’s only English-language bookstore in Upsala, too, said it expects a coven of witches and warlocks to attend the midnight launch.

In an interview on Thursday in the Daily Express newspaper, Rowling said the Harry Potter saga would “definitely” come to an end after her seventh book when the schoolboy wizard leaves Hogwarts school.—AFP