An opening video interview with Rowling sort of disavows almost everything that follows: 95 percent of the magic in her books is made up, she attests. The oldest books date back to the start of the last millennium: from the 12th century a book offers a remedy for snakebite from a plant known as Centaury, and an astronomical miscellany illustrates the dog-shaped constellation Canis Major (aka Sirius). There’s also a real cauldron from the Bronze Age, the so-called Battersea Cauldron ( pictured below © Trustees of the British Museum) which could be more than 3000 years old, alongside a real broom, a real bezoar, a real mandrake (very creepy). Some Chinese oracle bones are from before 1000 BC.
One or two exhibits are staggeringly old. It’s a bizarre and sometimes jarring experience wandering along display cases which include material from the 1990s alongside items of ancient vintage. Never in her wildest fantasies can Rowling have imagined being exhibited alongside Leonardo da Vinci, but here they both are: a page from one of Leonardo's notebooks illustrates the sun and moon revolving around the Earth in this context his mirror writing has a sulphurous whiff of necromancy. One next to a draft of text about Professor Quirrell explains that the author was “writing in biro, on unlined paper”. If this exhibition is to be a gateway drug for Potterheads, they’ll need to get used to po-faced gallery labels. The story of how she wrote the book, she says, “is written invisibly on every page, legible only to me.” Talking of invisible, a certain cloak hangs from a thick hook in a display case. There is also an annotated first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Hermione, it should be noted, has big curls.
These illustrations were made several years before the first book’s publication.
The real surprise from Rowling is a set of her own sketches of her characters (including Nearly Headless Nick and the squib Argus Filch). The bait is a sizeable loan from JK Rowling, including handwritten drafts, proofs, a scribbled map of Hogwarts ( pictured below © JK Rowling), a guide to the sorting hat, a gridded plot plan of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, on which one panel reads in fanfaring capitals, “DOESN'T REALISE UNTIL THERE THAT THE HALL CONTAINS PROPHECIES”. For one and a half days a week, you won’t be able to get in unless you’re in a school party (sections of it will be displayed on panels in 20 public libraries in the UK). The show is astutely pitched at younger gallery-goers. “I’ve got to get to the library!” says Hermione Grainger on the inside flap of the exhibition book. Harry Potter: A History of Magic is at the British Library.
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