Dangerous Books
Volumes that harm the people who open them. Read the label first.
12 volumes
A N.E.W.T.-level Potions textbook. The printed text is unremarkable. The previous owner's handwriting in the margins is the entire plot of the sixth novel.
A cloth-bound octavo bought from a Bible seller in Buenos Aires. It has infinite pages, none of which can ever be found twice.
A textbook that has to be restrained with a belt, attacks anyone who opens it, and can only be calmed by stroking the spine. Flourish and Blotts keeps the stock in a cage.
A twee picture book about a rabbit in trousers, found by a colony of newly intelligent rats, who take it for a description of how life could be.
The most famous book that does not exist. A grimoire of pre-human history and summoning rites, surviving in a handful of guarded copies, quoted just often enough to convince generations of readers it was real.
A directory of the gods and demons of the Discworld, giving their names, addresses and summoning rites. Its author preferred to be known as Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches.
The spellbook the Creator left behind after making the Discworld, containing the eight Great Spells. It is chained in the cellars of Unseen University, and it has opinions.
The genuinely lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, dealing with comedy — reconstructed by Eco, hidden in a Benedictine library, and defended by a murderer who poisoned its pages.
The book that explains how to make a Horcrux, removed from the Hogwarts library by Dumbledore and kept in his office. Hermione steals it on the way out of the castle.
The holy book of Omnia, assembled from the words of seven prophets, and enforced by an Inquisition. The god it describes has not been consulted about any of it.
A book of dragon-summoning stolen from the Unseen University Library by a secret society, on the theory that a dragon would make an excellent political instrument.
A German study of surviving secret cults, printed in Düsseldorf in 1839. Its author was strangled six months later in a locked room, and the manuscript of his second book was torn to shreds.