After months of planning, after weeks of in-store alerts from the home office, after countless conference calls and meetings with the rest of the district, the night the final Harry Potter book was to be sold finally arrived.
I spent a good part of last week in preparation for this night. We were expecting around 500 people to show up, most of them having made reservations to pick up the book, but a good number just dropping by on the night. We had received almost 200 boxes of books, kept under lock and key. We had even taped up the window to our receiving room so that no one walking by might accidentally get a glimpse of the boxes, let alone open them before 12:01 AM July 21st. Our booksellers were planned down to the half hour in some cases and the store was mapped out for the event. We'd brought out the velvet ropes, moved fixture, stocked up on toilet paper, and printed out list after list after list.
Thanks to my shall we say enthusiasm about the book and about the release party, I was the one to organize all the games. Not happy to have the basics of face painting, bean guessing and setting up a
polaroid so people could take pictures with a cardboard cut out of Harry, I slaved away creating other amusements for the evening: a "sorting bag" since a hat was unavailable, where customers could pick out cards from the bag that placed them in one of the 4 Hogwarts houses...with a list of trivia about the house on the back. This took me several hours as each card had to have the house letter stenciled on and then have the trivia sheet glued to the back. Then I thought we needed to do fortune telling, divination such a key point in the books. I gotta say, coming up with 20 Potter-related fortunes was incredibly frustrating. I finally came up with rather funny fortunes involving
polyjuice potion,
Quiddich, Yule Balls, and
Howelers. Then the coup
de grace, the trivia raffle. 25 trivia questions based on HP 1-6 placed around the store; if answered correctly entered the customer in a raffle for a Harry Potter pillow.
The evening began by checking in each and every customer and handing them a wristband. We went
thru over 960 wristbands that night. The immediate rush of customers at 6 pm, the stated time we'd hand out the wristbands, was startling. We're a tiny store, the smallest one in our district. I've never seen that many people in the store before...or so I thought. We kept the check in desk open till around 11 pm. At 10:30, an hour and a half before the book could be sold, we had customers in group1 lining up. And that line just got bigger. Meanwhile I was running around making sure all the activities were staffed, that booksellers had access to all the give aways we had in spades: tassels in the
Gryffindor colors with the date, glow in the dark HP glasses and temporary tattoos. Towards the end we were just tossing these freebies out to anyone who wanted - which is harder to do with plastic glasses than you might imagine.
As it neared midnight, more and more people came into the store. Seas and swarms of people some in costume, some in tank tops and jeans, were milling about the store, waiting...and might I add making a damned mess of everything.
The next hour was pretty much a blur. I herded those almost 1000 people into various lines, leading them to the moment when they could buy the final Harry Potter. The excitement level was palpable - literally. The air vibrated with all the bodies and voices. The bleeding blisters on my heels, the pain in my feet, the exhaustion all vanished for the hour and a half we sold the book to all the waiting customers. As we neared the end of the crowd and those who purchased the book left, the noise level understandably dropped and I started to be able to breathe again.
Our last customer bought his book at 1:20 and finally we were free...to clean up the store.
I got home at 3 am and spent the next 2 hours reading, finishing half of the book.
And of course the next day was just as hectic and we sold over 1600 copies in 24 hours. If a customer came up to buy something that wasn't Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it was a shock.
Yes, by Monday afternoon (for I worked all day Saturday, Sunday and half of Monday) I was a husk of a person. Yes, my feet are dead and my headaches are finally subsiding. But I am eternally grateful that I was there. I was there to plan out and execute my ideas on the biggest book buying day I think we'll ever see. I was part of this grand social experience. Everyone who is a book person or a Potter person or just someone with their finger on the occasional pulse of the times will remember when the finale Harry Potter book came out. And lucky me, I was there too.
