THE hype for the latest Harry Potter book has left no British town untouched but the most fevered anticipation has been in a small market town in north Hertfordshire.

Royston, with fewer than 15,000 people, has ordered more books per home than any other postal district. One in 18 households has ordered a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, according to Royal Mail, which will deliver almost 550,000 copies, a total of 400 tonnes, of the book tomorrow.

The last bookshop in Royston closed about seven years ago and readers appear to have shunned their local Tesco despite its promise to sell the book at the low price of £7.97.

Royston narrowly beat the Gloucestershire town of Dursley, which happens to share the same name as the boy wizard’s unpleasant Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia. Residents ordered one book for every twenty-one households, the same number as in Harpenden, in Hertfordshire, and Buckingham. Aylesbury Vale was ranked fifth with one copy for every twenty-three households.

The anticipation for the book has been met with anger in some communities. Pupils from The Holt Primary School in Skellingthorpe, Lincolnshire, have been banned from dressing up as witches and wizards after a local campaign branded the books “evil”.

The Rev Richard Billinghurst, the Rector of Skellingthorpe, wrote to Paul Martin, the school’s headmaster, because he believed that Mr Martin was “seeking to lead our children into areas of evil”.

The complaint, on behalf of two parents, comes after the revelation that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before he was made Pope, described Harry Potter as promoting “subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul”.

The Bishop of Lincoln, Dr John Saxbee, said that parents need not be concerned by the references to witchcraft in the book. “Harry Potter is fiction and is no threat to the fact of the Christian faith,” he said.

But Mr Martin withdrew a day of “magical maths” and “spell invention” classes to avoid controversy, he said. “May I reassure parents that my staff and I only wished to raise the profile of reading and to have a bit of fun at the end of a very successful year,” he wrote in a letter to parents.

The remainder of the country is preparing to queue in by the thousand to ensure that they will be among the first to own a copy. Waterstone’s said that its Plymouth bookshop had received the most pre-orders, followed by Cork, Merry Hill in Birmingham, Gateshead and Dublin. Royal Mail said that all 2,000 of its delivery offices would deliver at least one copy of the book. James Eadie, a spokesman, said that the least excited city appeared to be Middlesbrough, where only one in every hundred households had ordered a copy.

THE WIZARDS

1 Royston, Herts, 1 in 18 homes have made orders
2= Dursley, Gloucs
2= Harpenden, Herts
2= Buckingham, 1 in 21
5 Aylesbury Vale, 1 in 23

AND THE MUGGLES

1 Middlesbrough, 1 in 100
2 Swansea, 1 in 75
3 Portsmouth, 1 in 58
4 Ilford, 1 in 56
5 Brighton, 1 in 55

THE AMAZON HALL OF FAME

The bestselling authors since the website was founded in the United States ten years ago

1 J.K. Rowling
2 Spencer Johnson
3 Nora Roberts
4 Dan Brown
5 Dr Seuss
6 John Grisham
7 Stephen King
8 J.R.R. Tolkien
9 Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins
10 Jim Collins
11 Phil McGraw
12 Robert C. Atkins
13 C.S. Lewis
14 Mitch Albom
15 Ken Blanchard
16 James Patterson
17 Stephen R. Covey
18 Mary Pope Osborne
19 Marcus Buckingham
20 Lemony Snicket
21 John C. Maxwell
22 Janet Evanovich
23 Robert T. Kiyosaki
24 Arthur Agatston
25 Tom Clancy

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