About the Harry Potter Lexicon
- history of the Lexicon
- sources of Lexicon information
- abbreviations
- about the artists
- Main FAQ Page
- support the Lexicon
Staff
of the Harry Potter Lexicon
The staff
of the Lexcon consists of just one person, me. Anything that isn't specifically
credited to someone else was researched, designed, and written by me.
The Lexicon
Forum is maintained by three of us, Kip and Denise being my fellow moderators.
Contacting
the Lexicon
Have something to say? Please follow
these steps:
- Please read the Lexicon FAQ. I get asked many of the same questions over and over. A big part of the reason for creating that FAQ is to give answers to those questions and save you the trouble of emailing (and me the trouble of emailing back and telling you to read the FAQ).
- Try looking it up, either with the search or in the main index. If the answer to your question is in the Lexicon already, I probably won't respond to your email.
- Do you have a theory or want to discuss the puzzles and mysteries? Don't send me an email, join the Lexicon Forum. I don't have time to discuss theories and ideas with everyone. That's what a forum is for. You'll find lots of really nice, intelligent people there who are eager to discuss Harry Potter.
- Email me, but not before you've worked through the previous steps. And then be patient. I get a huge amount of email and it takes me quite a while to get back to people sometimes.
History
of The Harry Potter Lexicon
The Harry
Potter Lexicon began before I even finished reading the first book. You
see, I've always kept notes and drawn diagrams and made lists about things
I enjoy. I have blueprints that I drew of the Death Star, painstakingly
drawn in 1977. I have a huge chart of all the episodes of Hogan's Heroes,
listing everything from writers and directors to the gadgets that were
used and when. I wrote notebook after notebook of detailed descriptions
of Star Trek characters and technology. When I encounter a well-designed
and imagined world in movies, television, or books, I find it almost impossible
not to catalog it.
Like I said, when I read the first Harry Potter book, the Lexicon began. I started cataloging it in my head, noticing details, scribbling down the page numbers where I could find the names of various books, and so on. I started scribbling maps of the castle. But I fought it. Cataloging something as thoroughly as I tend to do is HARD WORK. It takes a lot of time. It tends to take over my free time and annoy my wife. And it's also pretty much a thankless task, since no matter how carefully and expertly I do the work, no one ever sees and appreciates it.
This time it was different, though. This time there was the Internet. This time I could share all this work with a few other people. And the Harry Potter universe was just so exciting and fun and detailed and wonderful. But still I resisted. And then I read book two (and I remembered having some pretty strong doubts about book two, which looked as if it might have a flying car in it, which just didn't fit the world that I was imagining). I wavered now. Just reading through the description of the Weasley house made me want to start writing. Book three didn't help a bit. I knew that I was getting hooked. I started my first notebook with notes from Chamber of Secrets. I really can't remember why I started with the second book and not the first, but I did. And before you know it, I was moving on the book three. I filled page after page.
These notebooks are written in the order of the story, one chapter at a time. I automatically categorize everything as I go, so when I write down a magic spell or effect, I write "sp" in the margin. Everything gets a little scribble of some kind in the margin. I worked through three, and then went back for book one.
It was about then that two key events happened. I joined Harry Potter for Grown Ups and Goblet of Fire came out.
The Lexicon came into official existence a week later, in July of 2000.
At first it was just a series of lists. Lists of books, lists of Wizard Cards, lists of Death Eaters, and so on. I was trying to think up a good name for the site and settled on Lexicon because Encyclopedia was taken (by the now defunt Encyclopedia Potterica). Lexicon refers to a list of words, and at first, that's what this was. I can remember sitting on my back porch and running the name Harry Potter Lexicon over in my head and thinking that it sounded okay. I still think it sounds okay, although the Lexicon itself has grown way past being just a list of words.
In November, 2000 the Lexicon appeared for the first time on Yahoo, and within a week was chosen as a featured site in USAToday.
Of course, once I started it was impossible to stop. I'm a librarian, and I could imagine what the perfect reference source would look like. Once I could picture it and knew I could do it, I just had to make it happen. So I turned the list of spells into the Spell Encyclopedia and added the Bestiary and the Atlas. That was in the spring of 2001. Since then the Lexicon has grown until it encompasses nearly all factual information from canon sources, organized and crosslinked. The Lexicon Forum is a recent addition which provides an opportunity for Harry Potter fans of all ages to discuss their favorite books.
The Lexicon has been mentioned on the websites of both Scholastic and Bloomsbury. Warner Bros. has given its permission for the Lexicon to use the graphics drawn by Mary GrandPre for the books. The Lexicon is currently the third most-often referenced Harry Potter website on Google behind Warner Bros. and Scholastic. It's considered by fans to be the most complete and authoritative reference to the Harry Potter universe in existence and is visited by many thousands of fans daily from all over the planet. That's really cool. I love the Internet.
The next major milestone for the Lexicon will be the release of Order of the Phoenix in June. When that book comes out, the Lexicon will need a major overhaul to include all the new information which will be available. It should be an interesting and exciting summer!
