Chamber of secrets: The Alliance Distribution Services building on the NSW Central Coast, where the much-anticipated seventh and final book in the Harry Potter series will be protected by guards.
Photo: Janie Barrett
Unprecedented security covers the most tightly co-ordinated book launch in history. Caroline Marcus and Ebony Jemmett lift the veil.
MUGGLES, do you know what this chamber of secrets is? It might look like an average industrial warehouse, but in truth it is a repository for the most tightly kept literary secret of the year.
This NSW factory is where the final Harry Potter book will begin its magical journey across Australia into the hands of spellbound readers.
No one is allowed to open a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows before it goes on sale on Saturday, July 21, at 9.01am, the time of its simultaneous release around the world.
The book's Australian publisher, Allen & Unwin, has gone to extensive lengths to protect the contents of the much-anticipated book — including which of J. K. Rowling's main characters dies. It is even evasive about how the tome will make its way to book stores.
A security guard at the Tuggerah site, on the NSW Central Coast, tried to stop a Fairfax photographer from taking pictures, saying: "We've got all sorts of injunctions out for the security of this book.
"Everyone that's working with (the Harry Potter books) has signed confidentiality agreements. If anyone breaches anything, people will be prosecuted."
Andrew Hawkins, the publisher's publicity director, confirms, in a hushed tone, that there is "amazing security" around the book. "Secrecy is the operative word; I can't disclose anything," he whispers.
Yet despite the publisher's best efforts, The Sunday Age can reveal details of Operation Harry. The 14,790-square-metre Alliance Distribution Services site, in an industrial precinct, will be the first place in Australia to receive at least 750,000 hardback copies of the seventh and final book in the series from Britain, where it is published by Bloomsbury.
Here, the books will be sorted into boxes of 20 copies marked "HP 7". Then, on July 16, the cartons will be loaded into the distribution company's delivery trucks, to be dispatched to locations around the country.
Every bookseller has to sign an "amazingly thick" legal document, the kinds of which have been unheard of in the literary world, an Angus & Robertson spokeswoman said. "It's pretty off-the-record crazy, to be honest," she said.
"We have to get approval for everything, even the hours we have for a colouring-in competition."
Some of the more extreme clauses in the document include that the cartons must not be opened under any circumstances, and that the boxes themselves not be photographed or filmed before the on-sale date and time.
Source: The Age, Australia
Ye Hai Mohabbatein
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