Boxes have been chained shut, barbed wire has been uncoiled and satellite tracking systems for delivery vans have been double-checked. There is a fortnight to go before the publication of the final Harry Potter book.

The release of J. K. Rowling’s last outing with her creation at one minute past midnight on Saturday, July 21, will be the culmination of the most fraught operation in publishing history.

Precautions taken at the Harry Potter film premieres — such as men wearing infra-red goggles to detect anyone who has smuggled in a camera — are as nothing compared with the security surrounding the book.

Bloomsbury, its British publisher, is using padlocks and confidentiality contracts to ensure that the plot twists remain a secret. In the words of Scholastic, the American publisher, it is all about the “magic moment” when readers open Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for the first time. Only a few people have been allowed to read the book.

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Scholastic has shown it to a continuity editor, who ensures that spells are spelt the same way as in the six previous volumes. Cheryl Klein said that it was a tough job because Harry Potter fans can be obsessive about details. “I keep track of all the various proper nouns that appear in the series,” she told Time magazine. “For instance, with Bernie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, I make sure it is always B-O-T-Tapostrophe-S.”

Bloomsbury refused to send the manuscript to Scholastic electronically because it feared that it would be intercepted. Instead, Mark Seidenfeld, the American publisher’s lawyer, travelled to Britain to pick it up and, on his return journey, protected it from prying eyes by sitting on it.

After revisions the manuscript was delivered to Clays, a printer in Bungay, Suffolk, which installed extra barbed wire and hired guards to search print workers as they left work.

Printed books are now kept in locked boxes in warehouses across Britain ready for transport to bookshops. The delivery vans are fitted with global positioning system technology to ensure that they arrive at their destinations.

Neil Blair, Rowling’s lawyer, ensures that leaks are kept to a minimum by obtaining injunctions preventing anyone from reading the books before the embargo. In 2005 he obtained a “John Doe” order from the supreme court of British Columbia banning anyone from reading the 14 copies sold in error by a Canadian supermarket.

Donald Parfitt, a forklift driver from Clays printers, was sacked and sentenced to 180 hours’ community service after he admitted stealing pages of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Children have been invited by bookshops to midnight openings. Waterstone’s will have 279 branches taking part — nearly double the number for the previous volume.

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