UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections, housed in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre on the UBC Vancouver Point Grey Campus, has a vast collection of books, ephemera, archive material and other collections spanning centuries and covering a wide range of genre, subject matter, locales, and formats.
This project, completed as a component of Dr. Siân Echard’s ENGL 419A course in Term 2 of the 2017w session, specifically looks at a more contemporary section of UBC’s collection— a large collection of rare copies of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series— and at its heart will look at the first editions of the book in which the magic began for so many people, Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone (or in the United States of America, we’ll soon see, Harry Potter and The Sorcerers Stone).
The journey through this content begins using the navigation bar above. Sections under “A History of Magic” will explore the background to the series and of the books publication history, while sections under “Comparisons” will look at the American, Canadian and British editions in relation to each other. As well, “Other Magical Artifacts Found in RBSC” will show a small selection of other interesting pieces of the Harry Potter Collection, and “Links and sources” provides a link to relevant web pages as well as a Works Cited page.