unidentified boy wizard in Denver; Kirk D'Amato in NYC

Bella Stander's son wanted Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as soon as possible, so she took him down to Denver's Tattered Cover boosktore Friday night to wait in line with all the other families, snapping pictures for her blog all the while. "Used to be most of the people waiting in line were preteens; now they're mostly teens and adults," she observed. "Apparently the audience has been aging along with Harry."

Here in New York, Wiley publicist Cynthia Shannon spent much of the evening at SoHo's McNally Robinson bookstore, just down the street from Scholastic's Potter Alley. She spotted a few children in the crowd, like nine-year-old Sophie Frances, who's looking forward to reading a Potter book all by herself for the first time (though, between family and audiobooks she knows the plot of the first six volumes by heart). But, matching Stander's impressions nearly a continent away, the event was mostly an opportunity for adult Potter fans to converge as they waited for the saga's conclusion.

"Everyone was crowding around the book mountain area," Shannon reported, "where earnest looking guards were slapping away anyone who tried to get too close to the pile of HP cartons that were waiting underneath a grey table cloth wrapped in chains and topped with a cardboard tombstone reading 'Azkaban.' An explosive cheer erupted as the chains were cut at 11.55 pm, and everyone joined Jessica Stockton in the countdown to midnight... All of a sudden, people were storming to the front, too eager to exchange their voucher for the actual book. Some cracked open the book as soon as they hit the pavement, oblivious to honking horns and flashbulbs erupting."

Shannon also met YA author Robyn Schneider, who came to the party dressed as Hermione Granger. "I read the first Harry Potter book when I was in middle school and loved it so much that I decided I wanted to become a writer like my new hero J.K. Rowling," Schneider revealed when we emailed her later that weekend. (And she's on a roll: the 21-year-old pre-med student has published two books this year, with The Social Climber's Guide to High School coming out just last week.) Hermione has always been her favorite character—"probably because I'm also an obsessive student"—so when she went to the party with her editor at Simon Pulse, Caroline Abbey, dressing up was the perfect way to celebrate. (That's her in the red tie, with Abbey at her right; they're joined to the left by Tashina Graves and Sarah Leibovitz.)

"It's amazing to think that there were millions of people all over the world celebrating a children's book at the same time and staying up all night to read it," she reflected. "Seriously, I was walking through the streets of Manhattan in a cloak and schoolgirl outfit, and no one was giving me odd looks because they were all celebrating Harry Potter, too."