"There's a dedicated group, managers and processing staff, " McHugh said, to give the Harry Potter books the "special attention" they require, even among the three and a half million other parcels that come through An Post a day.

Amazon. com, which had roughly 2.2 million Harry Potter pre-orders as of Thursday and is responsible for much of the load going through An Post, felt the books required special attention as well.

Before the books ever got to An Post, they were held in Amazon's secret warehouse, where all of them were individually packaged by hundreds of employees, according to Ben Howes in the Amazon. co. uk press office. The secret warehouse, the hundreds of employees who ran it and the special teams set up by An Post were all dedicated solely to Harry Potter.

The warehouse also had to be guarded and all of the books had to be accounted for at all times thanks to the extremely stringent security measures required by Bloomsbury, JK Rowling's publisher. The company has spent �10m on security alone, according to the London Telegraph, and had five different embargo contracts for anyone who handled the books before the release date.

Though the embargo was widely successful on this side of the Atlantic, some copies of the books were sold as early as Wednesday in the United States and the New York Times reviewed the book in its Thursday edition, which prompted an angry statement from Rowling.