Hand of Glory

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 183885

 
Carol: 
> Moreover, a Hand of Glory is a Dark object. If he tried to show it
to his friends outside the Slytherin common room, Mrs. Norris would
have been onto it instantly and reported to Filch. 

Pippin:
Why do you think it's a Dark object? It was offered openly  without so
much as a warning label. As Dumbledore says, "There is nothing to be
feared from a body, Harry, any more than there is anything to be
feared from the darkness." 

It's an aid to thieves and plunderers, but so are the Invisibility
Cloak and the Marauder's Map. It's  macabre,  but considering there
are skulls in the Slytherin Common Room, House Elf heads on the walls
at GP, a troll's leg in the front hall, slimy things floating in
Snape's jars, and bits of dead dragon in quite a few wands, I don't
see why preserved tissue should set off any alarm bells.

Draco could have tested the hand in ordinary darkness quite easily,
and would have had no reason not to brag about owning it before he
thought of using it as part of his plot to get DE's into the castle.  

JKR mentioned checking things in the lexicon when she didn't have her
books available, so even if she doesn't re-read  cover to cover, she
does try to get things right. I'm not surprised she doesn't re-read
obsessively the way we do. Many artists value freshness and
sensitivity over technical perfection as do many critics. It's not the
lack of wrong notes that makes a pianist a star. 

On the letter, it may be we who aren't reading canon carefully enough.
I believe the inference is supposed to be that Sirius used the letter
as a bookmark and subsequently forgot about it, just as Harry did in
PS/SS. 

In PoA, Sirius says he was planning to go into hiding as part of his
secret-keeper charade. And what do we see Harry and Hermione do as
they're planning to go into hiding? Make arrangements for their
possessions. Storage space isn't much of a problem for wizards --
there's no reason Sirius couldn't have left the book and his other
belongings with Andromeda or taken it to wherever he was planning to
hide out. Once he was settled at GP, he could have asked someone to
retrieve his stuff.  The letter would remain inside the book all
along, forgotten until Snape discovered it.

Pippin