IT was 24 hours of sheer Harry Pottyness. First came tiredness and tantrums after queueing for hours for the book. Last night it was tears before bedtime, either from the discovery that a main character is killed or that Harry has a new girlfriend.

Tomorrow comes another revelation with the release of the sales figures. Did Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sell more than 1.77m copies in Britain yesterday, making it the biggest one-day sale?

“It was nearing midnight and the prime minister was sitting alone in his office,” begins the book, the sixth and penultimate instalment of the boy wizard’s adventures.

At the same witching hour Edinburgh Castle, a medieval bastion that has never been breached, suffered the indignity of being bedecked with images of Harry, as J K Rowling, his creator, arrived to read part of chapter six to 70 “cub reporters” who had won competitions around the world.

As the author started to speak from a red leather chair deep in the bowels of the castle, doors were flung open in 10,000 shops around the globe from Scotland to Singapore and Sydney and books began to fly off the shelves.

In the Australian outback, thousands of “Pottermaniacs”, some carrying live snakes, besieged bookstores. There were also queues in Beijing and in Mexico City, even though English-language versions were the only copies available.

“You get a lot of answers in this book,” said Rowling, who celebrates her 40th birthday in a fortnight’s time. “I can’t wait for everyone to read it.”

Her next bank statement will also make interesting reading. From one day’s sales £25m in royalties should magic their way into her account.

More than 300,000 people queued outside shops and supermarkets in Britain. Some had waited since 6.30am on Friday on the pavement in front of Waterstone’s in Oxford Street, central London where the queue was a mile long by the time the doors opened.

Sheila Hancock, the actress and widow of John Thaw, the star of Morse, was there with their grandchildren, Jack, 10, and Lola, 7. She said: “This is incredible. To be here with all this excitement, fun and expectation at a book launch is quite amazing. You don’t even get this type of thing with films or television.”

Jenny Eclair, the comedian, who brought her daughter Phoebe Eclair-Powell, 16, said: “When I was her age I was getting drunk and getting off with boys in dodgy places. That’s what she should be doing. Sometimes I wonder if this well-behaved girl is actually my daughter.”

Sam Rota-Payne, 9, from Boston, Massachusetts, who is on a Potter tour of Britain with his parents and brother, said: “It was well worth waiting in the queue. The new novel is more grown up than the other Harry Potter books and all the questions I have wanted to know about Harry have started to come together. I have already worked out who the Half-Blood Prince is.”

In Aberdeen revellers went straight from the pubs and clubs to buy copies of the book. “There will be a few people waking up this morning, finding the Half-Blood Prince next to them and wondering where on earth it came from,” said Justine Cruddace, manager of the town’s Waterstone’s.

The estimates drawn by Bloomsbury, the publishers, and by booksellers from advance orders in shops and reserved copies are a measure of the hype and anticipation. They put yesterday’s sale in Britain at between 1.7m and 2m. The final figure, drawn from electronic sales data gathered from 92% of book outlets around the country, will not be known until 4pm tomorrow.

The target was to sell 2m, as many as The Da Vinci Code has sold in the past year. If that many books were placed side by side they would need 66 miles of shelving, the distance from London to Portsmouth.

The Royal Mail said 150 extra trucks helped shift more than 500,000 copies of the book from warehouses across Britain for postal delivery yesterday.

W H Smith, which had 500,000 advance orders, said the book was selling yesterday at the rate of 13 copies every second in its stores, far exceeding the sale of eight copies a second of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the previous book in the series, on its opening day in 2003.

Some publishers have been told not to supply any other books to bookstores for the whole of August because buyers have used up their budgets.

Bloomsbury, which acquired the rights to publish the Potter books after Rowling was turned down by eight other firms, expects to make at least £20m profit this year from this one book. The worldwide target for the first day’s sales was 10m.

The recommended retail price was shredded almost everywhere in Britain. Kwik Save sold the book as a loss-leader for £4.99 in an exercise designed to promote its stores. Tesco brought it down to £7.97. Even so, the chain calculated it had to shift 300 copies a minute across its stores to make a profit.

Booksellers tried not to miss a trick. Ottakar’s — renamed Pottakar’s for the day — opened a stall at midnight at the Larmer Tree rock festival in Dorset to catch the captive audience of children there with their parents.

Additional reporting: Ben Dowell, Karin Goodwin

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