The Lexicon by Steve Vander Ark

Back when the Harry Potter series first started, a fan of the series named Steve Vander Ark started a website for people who loved the book, called "The Harry Potter Lexicon". There, he and a legion of devoted fans wrote entries for major and minor characters, Hogwarts Houses and items and potions mentioned in the books.

After the fifth book came out, Steve Vander Ark wished to publish the Harry Potter Lexicon as a book, but when J.K. Rowling heard of his plans, she was rightly concerned, seeing it as someone else getting rich off the hard work she had done, and she sought an injunction to stop anyone from publishing the book. She took the publishing company who sought to publish the Lexicon to court, and won an injunction against RDR publishing to halt the publication of the lexicon.

However the court, and the company did win a green light to go ahead and publish a less completely inclusive version of the Lexicon. This is the book, and I was mildly astonished to see in no less than two places on the cover, a long legal reiteration that Harry Potter and all related characters are the property of no less than J. K. Rowling, Warner Brothers, Scholastic Books, and so on and so forth. It's very strange looking to see this plastered over the front and back of the book so that all legal angles were covered.

The book itself is a greatly scaled-down version of the website, lacking the artwork and other flourishes on the pages of the website. This makes the book a bit dry and reference book-y looking, the kind of book you would suspect that Madame Pince, the Hogwarts Librarian, would find near and dear to her heart, although for anyone offended by the depiction of a librarian, J. K. Rowling explains that she had to make Madam Pince that way, since a helpful Librarian (as most Librarians are) would have destroyed half the plots she wished to build for Harry and his friends.

Still, the book does contain a lot of information, not only from the seven primary books, but also from the many companion books released: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Quidditch Through the Ages, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard, as well as radio and other interviews, J. K. Rowling's website and various other sources of information.

This book isn't the ne plus ultra of information on Harry Potter. For that, you'll have to consult the online Lexicon, which still exists and is filled with enough information for many, many books. each broken down into different headings. So while this book isn't everything, it does give you many places to get started, and can guide you to the much larger, much more informative online version. Recommended.