We're honored that our Magic Words: A Dictionary is cited by Meredith Danko in the Mental Floss article "32 Fascinating Harry Potter Word Etymologies."

"I wonder if his crystal ball is a talisman, too?"  From Cut Adrift by Albany Fonblanque, 1869.

Pictured: In a magical shop at Universal Studios Orlando, we discovered a crystal ball that seems to project holograms of its gazers in all directions.  Here's the snap we captured of the effect as we consulted the mysterious sphere.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to reveal the odd fellow.

By the way, the story of how The Young Wizard's Hexopedia came to be is just about as unlikely as the book itself.  One November morning, a stranger wrote from out of the blue, asking for assistance with an extraordinary book of magic.  The stranger turned out to be the CEO of a publishing house specializing in the world's quirkiest subject matter, in search of a grimoire that didn't technically exist.  His own research had somehow determined that I was the one with the know-how to bring this lost book back from the depths.  It seems that he had seen a window display of an esoteric bookshop and had noticed that the lost book in question wasn't there.  The problem was that no surviving copies of the book are known to exist.  My task was to rediscover and recreate the entire document from quotations and implications in magical literature.  The stranger provided me with some crucial scraps, trusting that the whole work might be holographically contained within the parts.  Knowing the title and a rough idea of the table of contents, I set to work hunting through cryptic volumes in private libraries of magic (whose locations I'm not at liberty to reveal, though I can say that I visited Hollywood's Magic Castle).  Suffice it to say, I left no philosopher's stone unturned.  The process was very much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle in a dark room, with only a flickering candle for illumination.  To my own surprise, the lost book began taking shape almost immediately.  Restoring fragments into sentences and arranging them into paragraphs proved less challenging than one might suppose.  For example, you can surely divine what the last word of this sentence will [...].  Whenever a passage seemed to have something almost tangibly missing, like the absence of a vital book in an esoteric shop window, I knew to keep digging.  The moment it was clear that the entire Hexopedia was restored, I verified the accuracy of my work with three highly gifted wizards of words: a playwright in New Hampshire, a poet in Pennsylvania, and a teacher of magical arts in Nevada.  Then I sent the restoration to the stranger, who flabbergasted me by suggesting that the book should not come back into print at all but rather remain hidden in shadowy slumber until a more enlightened era.  (Apparently the trickster merely desired a copy for his personal use!)  Having worked so intimately with the text for so long, I felt convinced that the world was ready once again for the Hexopedia ... that it shouldn't rest only in the private library of one megalomaniacal* publisher.  And the rest, as the former, is history.  Here's a random page from The Young Wizard's Hexopedia.

*Note that "megalomaniacal" is an anagram of "ole magi almanac," so it all seems to be part of some mysterious tapestry, eh?

Q: Do you ever wish you could read Harry Potter again for the very first time?

A: Yes, and here's how to do it.  There's both a physical and a mental (self-hypnosis-type) component to the technique.  We'll explain how the physical component facilitates the mental.  Acquire from another nation a copy of whichever Harry Potter novel you wish to read again; for example, if you first read an American edition and wish to stick with English, seek a copy of the book that was printed in the U.K., Australia, Canada, or so on.  This new copy will look and feel different from the one you first read, and that's crucial for truthfully telling your subconscious mind that you have never read this particular book.  Indeed, to read Harry Potter again for the first time will require a sly bit of auto-hypnosis, and it's far easier to begin by not lying to yourself but rather affirming that you truly never before have opened the book you are now holding.  Sitting comfortably with eyes half-closed, gaze upon the closed book in your lap and concentrate upon the "fact" that you have heard of Harry Potter but have never read any of the books.  Your willpower, focused for half an hour at a time, will lead your mind to believe that you are new to the Harry Potter saga.  Interestingly, there's a strong argument that authors like J. K. Rowling write their books in a state of self-hypnosis, due to the combination of intense concentration and the need to conquer the authorial ego so as to get in touch with the personalities of the story's characters.  "Every author knows the difficulty--in some cases impossibility--of dropping a story until it is finished.  He is under control of the idea, and can remove the obsession only by finishing the story.  Then he awakens, or partly awakes, for a time--until the next idea comes along" (Morgan Robertson, "The Self-Hypnosis of Authors," The Critic, 1906).  And so, like J. K. Rowling as she originally wrote her stories, you must concentrate and conquer the ego that believes it knows how it all turns out.  When Rowling was first inspired to write the original Harry Potter story, she had an outline in mind for how the events would unfold, yet when it came time to pen the very first word, to communicate the story properly she had to think like her future readers, unknowledgeable of how it would all turn out.  She had to approach the story in her head with what the Zen Buddhists call a beginner's mind.  If she could do this as the author of her own novels, you can do this as the reader.  You were once brand new to Harry Potter, and that mental state yet exists in your memory.  Make a concerted effort to reclaim that state of mind.  Tell yourself again, again, and again that you are a newcomer, until you're ready to open that new book.

Here's a precursor to Harry Potter — a travel guide to Boston entitled By Broomstick Train, illustrated by Charles H. Woodbury, c. 1895.