New York ? Anna Todd and Kelsey Barry, both 20, jumped up and down, screaming and hugging as they touched their Harry Potter books and smelled them as if handling a newborn baby.

“It smells like fresh parchment,” said Barry, among the first in line at the Barnes & Noble in Manhattan’s Union Square. “It smells like magic.”

For the last time, Potter dust sparkled worldwide. Like castles lowering their drawbridges, bookstores across Britain and the United States and as far away as Singapore and Sydney, unveiled their copies Saturday of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final volume of the young wizard’s adventures.

Eager readers, many of whom had lined up for hours, rushed from the tills, opening the thick hardback book to take in the opening words: “The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane.”

Inside were answers readers have waited long to learn and that J.K. Rowling and her publishers have labored, more than they desired, to keep secret. Will Harry kill evil Lord Voldemort, or die in the attempt? Who will be slain in the battle between the good guys and the wicked Death Eaters? And what are deathly hallows, anyway?

After obtaining a copy at a Singapore bookstore, Adela Lim, 16, flipped right to the end of the book, scanned the text furiously and exclaimed to her friends, “Oh my god! Oh my god!”

“I am aghast at the ending,” she said. “I’ve waited since the first book all the way until now, so I can’t wait anymore, I just want to find out the ending.”

Rowling, who a decade ago introduced her magical character in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” was giving a midnight reading to 500 competition-winning children in the grand Victorian surroundings of London’s Natural History Museum. Now richer than the queen, she sat in a large wing-backed chair and read the opening pages – description of a mysterious assignation, a clandestine meeting and important news for Voldemort.

For many of the hardcore Potter-maniacs, the place to be was Waterstone’s bookstore on Piccadilly in central London. More than 5,000 people lined up for hours before the midnight opening, in a festive, colorful line stretching around the block. Among the fans from as far away as Finland and Mexico were dozens of witches and wizards, a couple of house elves, a pair of owls and a woman dressed as Hogwarts castle.

Ken Zwier, 42, from Phoenix, Ariz., grew and bleached his hair to achieve the golden tresses of villain Lucius Malfoy. His wife and two daughters were in costume, too. The family planned to read the book aloud to one another on their flight back to the United States today.

Waiters at a bookstore in downtown Rome served customers colorful Potter-themed cocktails, a green one called “Serpeverde” – Italian for Slytherin – and an orange one named “Grifondoro” – Gryffindor.

The passion for Potter was almost life-threatening. In Canberra, Australia, a 21-year-old man jumped into the frigid waters of Lake Burley Griffin on Friday afternoon to retrieve a pre-order voucher he had dropped. Paramedics found the man shivering and distressed – and without the voucher, Emergency Services spokesman Darren Cutrupi said. He was given another voucher by the bookstore.

Rowling’s books about the bespectacled orphan with the lightning-bolt scar have sold 325 million copies in 64 languages, and the launch of each new volume has become a Hollywood-scale extravaganza.

Potter-mania spread throughout the globe. Tel Aviv’s Steimatzky bookstore was due to open at 2:01 a.m. local time today, defying criticism from Orthodox Jewish lawmakers for opening on the Sabbath, when the law requires most businesses in Israel to close.

Phnom Penh’s Monument Books – Cambodia’s only outlet for the book – expected its allotment of 224 copies to sell out within hours.

Portland, Maine, was going all-out with a 12-hour Mugglefest to celebrate the book’s launch. Fans wearing cloaks and carrying wands were riding the Hogwarts Express into a re-creation of King’s Cross station, and an old red-brick warehouse foundry along the city’s waterfront was converted into the magical shopping street Diagon Alley.

Security for the launch was fist-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 Rowling and leading fan sites, spoilers sprouted on the Internet in the days before the release, including photographed images of what turned out to be all 700-plus pages of the book’s U.S. edition.