Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them represents the fruit of
many years’ travel and research. I look back across the years to the
seven-year-old wizard who spent hours in his bedroom dismembering
Horklumps and I envy him the journeys to come: from darkest jungle to
brightest desert, from mountain peak to marshy bog, that grubby
Horklump-encrusted boy would track, as he grew up, the beasts described
in the following pages. I have visited lairs, burrows, and nests across
five continents, observed the curious habits of magical beasts in a
hundred countries, witnessed their powers, gained their trust and, on
occasion, beaten them off with my travelling kettle. The first edition
of Fantastic Beasts was commissioned back in 1918 by Mr. Augustus Worme
of Obscurus Books, who was kind enough to ask me whether I would
consider writing an authoritative compendium of magical creatures for
his publishing house. I was then but a lowly Ministry of Magic employee
and leapt at the chance both to augment my pitiful salary of two Sickles
a week and to spend my holidays travelling the globe in search of new
magical species. The rest is publishing history: Fantastic Beasts is now
in its fifty-second edition. This introduction is intended to answer a
few of the most frequently asked questions that have been arriving in my
weekly postbag ever since this book was first published in 1927. The
first of these is that most fundamental question of all – what is a
“beast”?