TEHRAN -- The seventh and final book in the “Harry Potter” series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, went on sale in Tehran on July 21st simultaneously with the world sale.

“The sale began at 2:30 am local time (12:00 midnight Greenwich Time), and 120 fans queued to purchase the Bloomsbury English edition of the book. The first customer in Iran to obtain the seventh volume of Harry Potter was twelve years old,” said the head of Bayan-e Salis Institute, as the representative of Harry Potter’s Publisher “Bloomsbury” in Iran. Hamidreza Talapur noted, “We guessed only 10 or 12 people would come to buy the book at midnight, but the number was much more. It had reached over 300 by the next morning.” “An original copy of the book costs 340,000 rials, which is equivalent to £17.99, the same price as in England,” he added. “The launch of each new book of the Harry Potter series has been accompanied by military-level security. No book was sold until a minute past midnight on Saturday. With respect to all this security being carried out across the globe, we had to follow the rules. I personally went to the airport to receive the sealed boxes and they were opened at midnight Saturday,” Talapur added. Manager of Cheshmeh Publications, Kaveh Kianian, also announced that the sale began yesterday at 9 in the morning and more than 100 books had been sold within a few hours. It seems that several translators have begun translating the book into Persian. It has been an extraordinary journey for the author of the series. When Rowling created Harry Potter, she was a struggling single mother, writing in cafes to save on the heating bills at home. Now, at 41, she is the richest woman in Britain -- worth $1 billion, according to Forbes magazine -- with houses in Edinburgh, London and the Scottish countryside. Her first book, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”, was published in 1997, with a print run of less than 1,000. By the time the book appeared in the United States in 1998 -- as “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” -- Harry was on his way to becoming a publishing phenomenon. The six Potter books have sold some 325 million copies in 64 languages, including Latin and Ancient Greek. “Deathly Hallows” has an initial print run of 12 million in the United States alone; more than 2 million copies have been ordered from the Internet retailer Amazon