Queen Street took on the feel of the Hogwarts Magic School dining hall late on Friday night as hundreds of witches, wizards and a few mortals queued up to get their hands on a copy of the fifth instalment in the Harry Potter series.

In a well-orchestrated outburst of Bermudian-style Pottermania, fans waited for more than an hour in anticipation of the release of `Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' by the Bermuda Book Store at one minute past midnight.

In the end, after an hour and a half of bustling bookselling, 150 copies of J.K. Rowling's 766-page tome had been scooped up by the crowd, who were kept in the spirit by costumed staff offering up goblets of butter beer, pumpkin juice and trays of cauldron cakes.

Many of the crowd, a large part of which were adults, saw fit to mark the occasion by dressing up, some by simply putting on a pair Harry Potter glasses, others decked out in the bushy beard reminiscent of Hagrid, the Hogwarts groundskeeper.

Afterwards, exhausted owner/manager Hannah Willmott said: "I'm delighted. This is tons more people that I thought we would have.

"We were originally going to be open at eight this morning but we started to get an inkling today of just how big this thing is. The phones just didn't stop ringing and I thought, we'd better buy some more snacks."

The first Bermuda sale, followed up by the Bookmart, which opened at 7 a.m., was only part of a worldwide frenzy which saw thousands of Potter-maniacs jam bookshops from New York to Edinburgh to Manila.

Publisher Scholastic printed an unprecedented 8.5 million copies of the book to meet demands in the United States. Of the 300 on offer at the Bermuda Book Store on Friday, 173 were reserved.

Sixteen-year-old Sara Franklin, who was the first Islander to get her hands on a copy, said: "It was really exciting buying the very first one and I've been anxious all day. I've been driving my mum crazy talking about it. I'm going to take it home and read it and then read it all over again."

Dressed up as her favourite character Hermione Granger, seven-year-old Wendy Tuxworth was all smiles at finally being able to devour up the latest chapter in the Harry Potter saga.

"I think it'll take me about three days to read it," she said. "I really wanted to get the fifth one. The best things about Harry Potter are the magic and the characters."

A member of what seemed to be a whole family of Pottermaniacs, Berta Barreto-Hogan said: "I've had no peace until I got this fifth book. I read the first four of them in three weeks and then reread them."

Her son Matthew, 9, said: "I had to come down tonight because I just couldn't wait until the morning."

And Julie Pitt, who strangely resembled Hogwart's deputy head teacher Minerva McGonagall in her witch's cape, explained why she thought Rowling's creation captured the imaginations of so many.

"She's created a world that is so meticulous and brilliantly made. She's done it so well that we want to live in it. She has managed to do something that many have tried. She's captured a span of generations and got them reading."