American Libraries

Steve Vander Ark: This is the one and only lexicon Harry Potter encyclopedia. This is a book which took quite a long journey to get here—pretty proud that we finally have the book published. This is a book, which has been completely rewritten, basically, once the trial was over, so that we now have a book which is completely safe and fair use. And we're really excited about it. I think it's a wonderful book.

George Eberhart: What was the most fun thing you had in compiling all this stuff over the years?

Steve Vander Ark: Oh my goodness, Rowling’s writing is so rich—just so many levels of meanings of things, words, character names, some of the mythology she harkens to, and all those kinds of things. So I think part of the fun of it over the years, for both of us, has been to tease these things out and kind of figure out where she was going, kind of below the surface, and finding some of the new interesting background material. And a lot of that is in this book, actually. That was part of the fun of writing this, was just going through all that material.

George Eberhart: And RDR Books is the people who made it all happen, right?

Lisa Bunker: Yep, they sure did.

Steve Vander Ark: This is one of the other authors.

Lisa Bunker: I'm one of the co-authors.

George Eberhart: Oh, I see—Lisa. Glad to know you.

Lisa Bunker: Nice to meet you, too. It's things like if you look at the Moaning Myrtle entry: it's when you make that connection with what you think —you don't know what was in her mind—but what you think might have been and just make a wonderful connection with something that really works. That's just tremendously exciting.