Advanced Potion-Making

A catalogue of fictional books mostly records what books say. This one is here because of what a book accumulates.

The printed volume is inert — Libatius Borage’s competent, official, slightly-wrong instructions, identical in every copy in the cupboard. What makes Harry’s copy singular is that a specific unhappy teenager spent years arguing with it in pencil. Crossings-out. Better timings. Stir counter- clockwise. And then, further back, spells that are not corrections at all but inventions, including one marked simply for enemies.

Rowling is doing something genuinely sophisticated here about how we read. Harry trusts the handwriting completely, and he trusts it because it is handwriting — intimate, unofficial, clearly cleverer than the authority it defaces. He builds a whole relationship with a person he has never met, from marginalia, and gets it entirely wrong about who they are. Anyone who has ever bought a second-hand book and felt fond of the previous owner knows exactly the feeling being exploited.

And the object is dangerous in the plainest way in this catalogue. Not cursed, not poisoned, not sentient. Just a school textbook containing an instruction a sixteen-year-old will follow without understanding it.

On the readability rating. Numerous fragments — the flyleaf inscription, individual corrections, the spell names and their one-line annotations. Of the textbook proper we get essentially nothing, which is the joke.