Number 5 in Hand

June 21, 2003

As promised, I went over to B&N tonight to pick up the newest addition to the Harry Potter series. It was a ridiculous scene, which I'm sure you'll see pictures of in tomorrow's paper. I ended up going to the store near me, as I was lazy and just learned that there was one on the corner of State and Court. It didn't matter though as the place was jumpin'.

When I arrived at 11:45 I could barely get through the door. There was a sea of people, a number of whom were wearing costumes of some kind. Also, people who preordered the book received Harry Potter glasses, which many adults decided to wear around the store. I found this both amusing and confusing. It was confusing because at 12:30, people were still wearing them. Usually the novelty wears off after a few minutes.

In order to get your book you had to take a ticket. Those who preordered received tickets lower in number than us lower class walkins. When they began calling numbers at 12:01, they started with XX1700-XX1749 (The Xs are to protect the anonymity of...er, I forget the first two numbers). I had number XX1842. That means over a thousand theoretical people were before me. So, I sat down and began reading Stupid White Men since, for some reason, I can't bring myself to buy it. I got through the first thirty pages when they got dangerously close to my number. I ended up picking up my copy at around 12:50 and heading home.

In hindside, there weren't a thousand people there, but 5-700 is not a bad guess. This was at one store in Brooklyn, so if you extrapolate that for the entire country, it's a lot of books.

The coolest thing was the range of people who were there. There were a lot of cute kids with their parents, but there were also plenty of people my age, single men/women of all ages, male teenagers in groups and pretty much anyone else you can think of (with the exception of any english professors at Columbia). The man in front of me in line had his wife waiting in the car outside and he made it clear that the book wasn't for him and she owed him big time. I think he was buying it for himself, but I didn't follow him outside so I have no proof.

I'm excited to see people excited about reading. I'm excited to see an entire bench of people reading the new book on the subway Monday morning.

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