The book starts with a brief look into Joanne Rowling's (J. K. Rowling) life. It whisks through her personal relationships, her early jobs and education, and personal tragedies in her life. A particular favorite anecdote of mine is where Rowling apologizes to France for giving her book's famed villain, Voldemort, a French name.
Descriptions of action figures, books, jewelry, and collectibles of all sorts make up the bulk of this book, as one would expect. Pictures are sized generously, often with only 3 or 4 figures per page, nestled or wrapping around its text description to save a little space. Even these short descriptions, which one would expect to just read variations of "Harry, black robe variant, $20 - $25" are actually pretty interesting to read, for what they are. Often they tell of discrepancies between a figure and the movie, or rarity based on manufacturing defects. On a more practical note, there are even things like checklists for some games, so you can be sure you've got every card that say, a Harry Potter board game is supposed to contain.
Of course, this is a collector's book, so your main draw should be to look up the value of some rare collectible. Flipping through the book, I was a little disappointed to find that items I thought would fetch a high value were merely going for $10 - $20. The big money is not in props and replicas, apparently. Perhaps it is in this spirit that many of the chapter introductions encourage collectors to collect because they like to, not because they're hoping to make some money. Well, there's some sound advice for a collector's handbook.
Although Harry Potter Collector's Handbook is an interesting read, it is a short one. The stories and summaries of pop culture only make up at most 10 - 15 pages of the book, so if you're reading for that, you'll be done quickly. This book does not claim to be a comprehensive list of Harry Potter collectibles either, so don't come expecting that either. Even so, it does cover all the bases you'd expect for a collector's book. And yes, it does cover the value of the books themselves. The author, William Silvester, seems to have put a lot of love into the book, and it shows. I'd say this book is a sure bet for a casual collector, and will probably entertain the collector's household for a while as well.
