Before I get to the latest updates and new pages, I need to take the opportunity to officially welcome Michele Worley to the staff of The Lexicon. Until now, the staff of the Lexicon has consisted of just one person. A lot of folks have contributed over the years, but no one has actually become a staff member. No one but me has ever had hands-on access to the 450+ pages of the Lexicon. I was and still am very protective of this website.
When Michele first started sending me notes and information, I wasn’t looking for an assistant editor. As her emails kept coming, however, and as I realized the quality of research she was doing and more importantly, the care with which she wrote about the Harry Potter canon, it dawned on me that what she was sending me was virtually identical to what I was doing myself.
Michele agreed to become the assistant editor and has been busy adding information and doing a lot of editing that has been sorely needed. She’s doing a spectacularly great job, and I am delighted to have her aboard. If you get a chance, you can email her at [email protected] and welcome her and thank her yourself. She’s really the one responsible for all the information from the new book making it into the Lexicon so soon.
And because she’s been hard at work adding that new information, I’ve had a chance to create some new pages:
- The Complete Guide to Magic is an index that incorporates spells, potions, magic items, and other terms into one nice list.
- The Hogwarts pages have been updated with new information about the locations of various rooms. We now can place every known room on a floor of the castle except the Transfiguration classroom.
- The map of the ground floor of Hogwarts has been updated to include the corridor of classrooms and also an entrance to the courtyard that is mentioned in CS.
- Madam Pince’s page has been given an update including a beautiful drawing by Marta T. of Harry and Ginny being thrown out of the library (“Chocolate in the LIBRARY?!”). I’ve reduced the image to make it load faster, but if you click on it you’ll be able to see the picture in all its glory. Believe me, it’s worth the download time.
- Two new magic pages have been added, one about Vanishing Magic and the other about Movement Magic. These pages discuss the various levels of these general categories of magic and list the various spells and items which create the magical effects. I’m hoping to add more of these kinds of pages covering other types of spells.
- A new chart has been added to the Timelines section. This is a master chart of classes from 1965 through the present, with a seven-year block for each class at Hogwarts. You can tell who is at school with whom very easily. I’ve added several staff members to the chart too, indicating when they began teaching at Hogwarts.