The seventh and last Harry Potter book, 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows', went on sale world wide at a minute past midnight last night.
Bookshops across the UK and US, in Ireland and as far away as Singapore and Sydney, welcomed hundreds and in some cases thousands of eager readers, and the book is set to be one of the fastest selling of all-time.
Author JK Rowling, unknown ten years ago when the first of the series appeared, is now Britain's richest woman.
She gave a midnight reading from the book to 500 competition-winning children in the grand surroundings of London's Natural History Museum.
Security for the launch was tight, with books shipped in sealed pallets and legal contracts binding stores not to sell the book before the midnight release time.
But despite pleas from the author and leading fan sites, spoilers appeared on the Internet in the days before the release.
They included photographed images of what turned out to be all 700-plus pages of the book's US edition.
In France, the daily Le Parisien revealed how the final instalment ends, in a small article that it printed upside down.
The book's French publishing house, Gallimard Jeunesse, condemned the newspaper's revelation.
As many as 1,200 copies were shipped early in the US by an online retailer, and two US newspapers published reviews last Wednesday, more than two days ahead of the official release.
An Australian fan had to be rescued from a lake in the capital Canberra yesterday after he dived in to rescue a pre-purchase receipt necessary to pick up his book.
In Pakistan, a car bomb discovered outside a shopping centre in Karachi forced the cancellation of a 4am launch party in a book shop in the centre.
