Ficta Books that were never written

The Wizarding World  ·  Bestiary

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Newton Artemis Fido Scamander

Can I actually read this? Yes. Someone printed it. You can buy a copy. Published in our world

A standard Hogwarts textbook classifying the magical creatures of the world, and one of the few fictional books you can order tonight and have on your desk tomorrow.

This is the entry that justifies the whole catalogue, so it is worth being precise about what happened to it.

In 1997 it was one line on a shopping list. Rowling needed a first-year book list to feel real, so she wrote seven plausible textbook titles and moved on — the kind of throwaway worldbuilding that appears in every fantasy novel and is never thought about again. In 2001 she wrote the book. Not a novelisation, not a companion volume: the textbook, 128 pages of dry taxonomic entries with a Ministry classification scale, published under Scamander’s name by a publisher that does not exist, as a facsimile of a specific fictional boy’s specific scribbled-on copy.

Then it became five films.

Track the movement: mentioned → described → written → printed → filmed. A fictional book completed the entire journey into reality in twenty years, and along the way raised a very large amount of money for Comic Relief. There is no other example in this catalogue that travelled the full distance, and it is why this library records readability on one honest scale instead of a badge. The question “can I actually read this?” has a genuinely surprising answer here, and the surprise is the point.

On the readability rating. Yes. Completely. It is on shelves in ordinary bookshops between real bestiaries and real natural history.

In-world history

Scamander was commissioned by Obscurus Books in 1918 and the first edition appeared in 1927; it has run to more than fifty editions and remains the approved Hogwarts text. Harry's own copy was thoroughly defaced by himself and Ron Weasley, and the real-world edition reproduces the graffiti.

Why it matters

In the novels it is furniture — a required text, one item on a first-year book list. Outside them it became the seed of an entire film series, which makes it one of the most commercially consequential fictional books ever invented.

Appearances

  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997) — J. K. Rowling Listed among the set texts on Harry's first Hogwarts book list
  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999) — J. K. Rowling

Editions in our world

  • Obscurus Books / Bloomsbury and Scholastic, 2001 Published in aid of Comic Relief, printed as a facsimile of Harry's own copy, complete with the marginal doodles he and Ron added to it.
  • Illustrated edition, Bloomsbury, 2017 Expanded with six additional beasts and illustrations by Olivia Lomenech Gill.

Connected volumes

Catalogue record

Category
Bestiary
World
The Wizarding World
First appearance
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, 1997 — as a line on a shopping list
Readability
Published in our world
Books That Escaped Into Reality Fictional Reference Works Set Texts

Sources

  • J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Bloomsbury, 1997), ch. 5, "Diagon Alley" — the set-text list.
  • Newt Scamander [J. K. Rowling], Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Obscurus Books / Bloomsbury, 2001), published for Comic Relief.

Comic Relief

Added by house · last checked 2026-08-05