Harry Potter fans queued up at Borders in Oxford last night to snap up some of the first copies of JK Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard.

The bookshop in Magdalen Street stayed open until 1am to cater for fans wanting the Beedle tales, which Rowling wrote after finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final work in the series.

The book normally sells for £6.99 but Borders was selling it at £4.99, with Waterstone’s in Oxford offering a sale price of £3.49. Blackwell’s in Broad Street stuck to the cover price of £6.99.

David Martin, a spokesman for Borders, said: “We set up a special display with a forest woodland and the books were selling well. We expect to sell a lot more of them today.”

Rowling is donating the net proceeds from sales of the book to her charity, the Children’s High Level Group, which helps vulnerable children, particularly those in Eastern Europe.

The tales were a central part of the final Harry Potter book, with Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, giving a volume containing five wizard fairy tales to Harry’s friend, Hermione Granger.

It offered clues to help Harry to defeat his enemy Lord Voldemort.

Only The Tale of the Three Brothers, one of the five tales, was published in the final Potter book.