My Harry Potter bookshelf

Yup, I’ll just own up to it straightaway: I have a Harry Potter bookshelf. Why? For many different reasons, but since my love for the Harry Potter series runs deep, I would have to devote an entirely new blog post to it. And that’s not this one. Today, I just want to take you through what I keep on my Harry Potter bookshelf and why.

My Harry Potter bookshelf

My love for Harry Potter knows hardly any bounds and so it happened that in recent years I gathered quite a few bits. I’m mostly loyal to the books though and haven’t invested much in other knickknacks. That said however, I do own some additional Harry Potter swag and of course also have DVDs for all the movies, but since the books are the reason why I love this series, I decided to talk you through that part of my HP ‘collection’.

First of all, apologies for the crooked picture. One, that corner of my room is incredibly crooked to begin with and I keep my Harry Potter stuff on the top shelf, making it hard to reach. Since it is a book series I reach for almost every year, I know where to find it though and so I know that it doesn’t matter having it high up. It just makes it difficult to take a decent picture.

Bang in the middle of the shelf is my original set of the books. As you can see there is one odd edition in the mix. Way back in the day, my mom had heard of the series, not knowing it was a series. So she bought me the book, but it was the second one. And it was the one published by Scholastic. So for years, I had the complete Bloomsbury series, apart from book 2. I picked up the 3 paperbacks at a drugstore back when Harry Potter was very unknown in The Netherlands. That’s when I
started reading them.

Later on, I bought books 5, 6, and 7 pretty much when they were up for sale. I read Order of the Phoenix and Half Blood Prince separately, but by the time Deathly Hallows was released I took some time and read everything from start to finish before moving on to the next book. And after re-reading the series that first time, I didn’t really stop. I think in the past 5 years, I have re-read this stack of Harry Potter books every year.

However, that one odd edition didn’t sit very well with me after a while. So when the paperback boxed set you see on the right was heavily reduced in price around my birthday last year, I decided to buy it. Only to receive it and finding out that is was a box set published by Scholastic, making it a full set of US edition HPs, rather than UK. Call me picky, but I wanted the British ones. The boxed set was too pretty to return though and I didn’t realize it until a good while later, so I decided to hang on to it.

Enter this year, I picked up a couple of random books here in previous years. Tales of Beedle the Bard, Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them, were already part of my collection. This year I added the illustrated edition of The Philosopher’s Stone when that went on sale and I got the two books Film Wizardry and From Page to Screen this year at the Leavesden Studios and for my birthday respectively. And of course I couldn’t leave out The Cursed Child when it was published last July.

The main killer on the shelf however is the boxed set on the left. After that little mishap with the US paperback set, I spotted the Bloomsbury Signature boxed set and knew: that would be perfect. So I asked money for my birthday and with some giftcards and birthday money I bought the boxed set. It is a hardback boxed set (because my original set is part hardback and part paperback, I decided to make up for that little mismatch too) and it is absolutely stunning.

Truth be told, I don’t think the boxed sets I bought will ever see much reading. Mostly they just look nice on the shelves and that’s it. I would just be too scared to wreck them. Because my original set has been through hell. From annotating the pages when I was trying to learn more English to stains and rips from having it in my bag time and time again: that is not something I want to do to the other sets. So for now, they are just there to look pretty.

Is a (book) series that you have multiples of?