Preparing for the Summer of Potter is not as easy as one might think.

You can't just sit back and wait for the July 21 release of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the seventh and last installment in one of the most popular all-ages book series ever.

There are books to order, costumes to make, vacations to reschedule, parties to attend, grand Potter fests to plan, and many unforeseen obstacles to overcome.

Like, if you're a summer camp director, how do you judiciously balance this dilemma: Many of your campers want to read "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" in camp as soon as it comes out, but many others don't want to hear one word about how the book and series ends until they can go home and read it themselves.

"We still haven't figured out how we're going to handle that one," said Scott Weinstein, director of Camp Med-O-Lark in Washington, an arts summer camp east of Augusta. "I had planned to take a field trip to the bookstore, so (campers) could get the books. But I've heard from a lot of campers who don't want to be told how the thing ends. Harry Potter fuels a lot of opinions, really."

Opinions, and actions.

In March, 20 Portland-area youngsters began the important work of helping to plan and structure a huge Potter gala called MuggleFest. The 12-hour festival will be held in an old factory complex on the Portland waterfront and feature a re-creation of Diagon Alley, the shopping district in the Potter books.

People can buy all kinds of Potter-inspired stuff, play games, see lots of entertainment, and pick up a book at midnight as soon as it is released. Some 800 tickets have already been sold, with very little publicity.

TAKING THE JOB SERIOUSLY

The kids on the MuggleFest advisory board range in age from 6 to 13, and take their responsibility very seriously. They've attended meetings, inspected sets for the festival, and spent a lot of time e-mailing ideas on how to make the fest as authentic as possible.

When organizers of Muggle-Fest wanted to print paper Potter money to be used during the event, because it was fairly easy to do so, the youth advisers said no. In the book, the currency is Galleons, which are coins. So a token maker in Ohio was found to mint the Galleons.

And then there was the question of characters in the book who have died: Should they be represented or portrayed during MuggleFest?

"They decided that since this event is not set in any particular time, all the characters can be there," said Kirsten Cappy, a Portland-based children's book event planner who was hired to run MuggleFest by the nonprofit group Youth and Family Outreach. "They've done some pretty sophisticated thinking about this."

A date for the beginning of this Summer of Potter could be June 25, when the "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" video game, based on the fifth book, hits stores. Then on June 28, in Tokyo, the film version of "Order of the Phoenix" has its international premiere. The film opens in the United States on July 13.

'DEATHLY HALLOWS'

But the high point of the summer will be July 21, when the seventh and final book in the Potter series, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" gets a 12:01 a.m. release at bookstores. The book, published by Scholastic in the U.S., has a list price of $34.99.

The book's release will be a moment that Potter fans have been waiting for, some of them for years. And preparing for nearly as long. Cappy, the MuggleFest organizer, began putting together this Potter extravaganza in July 2006, though she couldn't set an exact date until the author J.K. Rowling announced the July 21 release date of "Deathly Hallows" in February.

How big is the Potter phenomenon? More than 325 million copies of the six books have been sold, and they've been translated into 64 languages, according to Bloomsbury Publishing, the British company that has ultimate publishing rights to the Potter books. When...