Flourish and Blotts

Flourish & Blotts sells a great variety of books, including textbooks for Hogwarts courses and other books of general magical interest. In the back there is a corner devoted solely to Divination, which includes a small table stacked with titles like Predicting the Unpredictable: Insulate Yourself against Shocks and Broken Balls: When Fortunes Turn Foul. Another small display contains the book Death Omens: What to Do When You Know the Worst is Coming.

There is usually a display of gold-embossed spellbooks the size of paving slabs in the window, but in Prisoner of Azkaban, the front window holds an iron cage filled with hundreds of copies of The Monster Book of Monsters. To deal with the vicious books, set for the third year Care of Magical Creatures class by Professor Hagrid, the harassed manager had to gear up with thick gloves and jab at them with a knobbly walking stick, as the books tend to rip each other apart. The manager says that he had thought he'd seen the worst when "we bought two hundred copies of The Invisible Book of Invisibility - cost a fortune and we never found them ..."

In Chamber of Secrets, celebrity author Gilderoy Lockhart signs copies of his autobiography, Magical Me, from 12:30–4:30p.m., drawing a huge crowd of fans (mostly middle-aged women). This is also where Lucius Malfoy slips Tom Riddle's diary into Ginny Weasley's battered old Transfiguration book, thus bringing about the start of the events in Chamber of Secrets.