It's not unusual to see interesting characters walking the streets of Manhattan - but there were some particularly unusual ones out tonight! To celebrate the release of Harry Potter, Diagon Alley came to SoHo for the evening. Harry and his friends were nowhere to be found, but here are Professor MacGonegall & Hagrid - and I saw Snape lurking around somewhere too!

Scholastice employees got let out of work early to get a sneak preview. Now, personally, I'm getting ready for a pretty big kayak expedition tomorrow (at least big as day trips go) & I'm a lot more keyed-up over that than I am over Harry Potter (although the Harry Fairy will be delivering free copies to all full-time Scholastic employees' desks over the weekend & I'm looking forward to reading it) - but I did decide to go take a look before I got going on packing up. Glad I did, too - our publicity department clearly had a ball bringing Diagon Alley to life on the block behind the Scholastic store, and everybody (except one owl) was having a great time!