Better Than a Vault at Gringotts
Oct 09, 2015
Fandom, Fans, News
Menahem Asher Silva Vargas, the Guinness World Record holder for largest collection of Harry Potter memorabilia, didn’t want to pack his over 4,000 items away in boxes somewhere. So this week, after a previous exhibition at Mexico City’s Museum of the Antique Toy, Silva Vargas opened his own museum.
According to an Associated Press article published by El Daily Post, “The House of Asher Potter” museum (a literary name if we ever saw one) opened in Mexico City earlier this month. Silva Vargas, or “Asher Potter,” started his collection in 2001 and has been building it for the past 15 years.
“I had the good fortune to be able to register it and make the Guinness record a year ago,” Silva Vargas, 38, said. “I’m very proud of it because the record belongs to Mexico. Mexico is now an authority on Harry Potter fandom.”
The collection is expansive. There are nearly 4,000 official items counted toward the record, but Silva Vargas also has nearly 400 paper items, including magazine articles, clippings, and autographs that weren’t counted. Rather than store it all away in a Gringotts vault where these things would never be seen, Silva Vargas opened his interactive museum in a family residence in Mexico City.
It recreates a number of passages from the novels, including the Potter home… There’s a themed cafeteria, a terrace, a small gift shop and a movie room… The museum also has the contribution of El Callejón D, a themed café located in the south of Mexico City, which offers museum visitors such Potteresque fare as veritaserum and butterbeer.
Visitors can also interact with two birds that Potter fans know well — a crow and a snowy owl…“We want to create a consciousness about birds of prey,” said Javier Illescas, a falconer and museum collaborator. “These two birds in the museum were rescued from logging areas.”
From what we’ve read of it so far, the House of Asher Potter may need to be added to a list of unofficial Harry Potter sites to see.
To read more, see the Associated Press article, here.
