Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Imagine that you’re the Ministry of Magic.  You’ve got these really excellent, newly minted Official Ministry Spellbooks that are about to become all the rage in the wizard community.  Obviously, you want to make sure that the Death Eaters can’t make copies of Official Ministry Spellbooks or use the books in ways and places they shouldn’t.  You, as the Ministry of Magic, come up with a scheme that makes this possible.  You decide to put a special magical lock on every different kind of Official Spellbook.  To open the Spellbooks and read the words wizards will need a specially designed wand.  The wand has three special ingredients in it:  a unicorn hair (cheaper than phoenix feathers), a special version of the Imperius Curse that limits what the witch or wizard can do once the Spellbook is open, and of course, the magical master key that opens the magical locks.

Now, the special wand and book arrangement doesn’t bother Dolores Umbridge.  She only does one or two things with her wand to begin with, and as a bonus, she loves rules and restrictions.  Arabella Fig couldn’t care less, because she doesn’t use magic at all.  Dumbledore, though?  Dumbledore is pissed.  The special wands and Spellbooks do nothing but hamper his clever uses of magic, because as we all know, he often does things that the Ministry never thought to account for when it designed the magic locks.  It’s not like he would ever do anything improper with the Spellbooks, anyway.  He’s just creative. Now he’s not even allowed to take the books along with him on his research sabbatical to Beauxbatons.

The real problem is that in order to accommodate the average wizard, the Ministry has to put the special wands on sale in Diagon Alley.  That’s great for wand sales, but it was really only a matter of time before a Death Eater stopped by to purchase one.  Remember that the magic key for every magic lock is in these wands.  It didn’t take long for Voldemort to extract the key, nullify that special Imperius Curse, and totally obsolesce the Ministry’s protection scheme.

So this magic lock and key system didn’t really do anything good.  It didn’t stop the Death Eaters, it cost the Ministry a lot of time and money, and it frustrated good, honest wizards like Albus Dumbledore.  I guess we should be grateful that inept organizations like the Ministry aren’t real and that magic wands with magic keys stuck right inside them definitely do not exist.  How stupid would that be?