Boy in U.S. buys 'Harry' ahead of launch

  July 13, 2005 at 9:09 AM ET
  Cheeser     Yahoo! News (via 1010wins.com)
  harry potter and the half-blood prince, scholastic, raincoast books


A boy in upstate New York was accidentally allowed to buyopens in new window a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in a drug store on Tuesday, ahead of Saturday's official release. Scholastic representative Kyle Good said it was the only known early sale in the U.S.

[Sylum] and his mother Mandy Muldoon said they were in an Eckerd pharmacy in Kingston Monday night when they saw a stack of the books on a shelf. After asking a worker if the book was the real thing, Muldoon bought it.

"They were pulled off an hour after they were put on the shelves," [store manager Christine] Ekblom said. "It was a mistake."

The boy's family planned to return the book to Scholastic publishing Thursday, although Sylum admitted reading about two pages.

"It's pretty amazing," Sylum told the Poughkeepsie Journal Tuesday at his home, 82 miles north of New York City. "Millions and millions of people around the world are waiting for this book."

Earlier, 14 copies were mistakenly put on sale in Canada. Both Raincoast and Scholastic, the respective publishers in that country and the U.S., have offered gift packages to those who turn in copies of the book before its general release on Saturday.

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