Pottermania: Booksellers gear up for books release

Whether he's squaring off against the evil Lord Voldemort or palling around with friends Ron and Hermione, Harry Potter means business.

And the boy wizard brings business everywhere he goes, too — just ask any business owner gearing up for tonight's midnight release of the series' final book.

Local booksellers have spent an untold amount of time preparing for the event, which started in early February when book publisher Scholastic revealed the release date and preorders began flowing in.

Catherine Weller, new books operations manager for Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore, spent Wednesday afternoon working on her "battle plan" to schedule additional employees and coordinate the distribution of hundreds of preordered copies of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" at the Salt Lake City Main Library's midnight party.

And then there are the issues of securing copies of what has been the most anticipated book in years. Potter fans across the world are anxious to know whether their young hero lives or dies, a fact Scholastic has desperately tried to keep secret until tonight's official release.

Booksellers have been required to sign releases and affidavits promising to keep the books under wraps until 12:01 a.m. Saturday, a requirement that has become more stringent with the release of each Potter novel.

"For Harry Potter, each successive book has gotten more and more contractually burdensome," Weller said.

And though it is quite a bit of additional work, it is well worth it, she said.

"I can't tell you, as a bookseller, how thrilling and encouraging it is to see people care so much about reading a book and to have it be such a collectively powerful experience," Weller said. "It's wonderful."

The frenzy continued at The King's English Bookshop on Thursday, where manager Margaret Brennan Neville finalized plans for the store's Harry Potter party as pallets of the very books sparking the furor were being unloaded from a truck outside.

Area businesses are also getting in on the action, with nearby Starbucks and Einstein Bros. Bagels staying open late tonight to serve the some 1,000 people expected to attend the block party. Salt Lake City has even given the OK to close a portion of 1500 East between Emerson Avenue (1505 South) and Kensington Avenue (1545 South).

"For us it really has become more of a community event," Brennan Neville said. "A share-the-wealth kind of thing."