Saturday, January 07, 2006 | 4:12 AM

Gone were the days where poorly lit, musty smells, worn covers, torn pages the norm of libraries. Yet this grandeur, awe-inspiring tome of knowledge aura survives the rough onslaught of time, the more glamourised and meteroic rise of the internet as a source of information and the general disengagement from the people from the need to read due to overbombardment of information.

The distinguished old gentleman with greying hair, dressed smartly in a black, pressed suit, making his way down the street in grey London in his trusty polished black boots, passing window displays with their bright, brash offerings, cold mannequins kept warm by animal fur, tapping his cane against the tiled pavement, slippery with the condensation of the sweat of the cold biting wind.

Libraries conjure up images like that in my mind.

There is also this scene in the first Harry Potter movie, depicting Harry in the Ollivander shop, buying his first wand. When I had first watched that scene, I thought the scene fitted the feel Rowling had given in her book, and when Harry felt a warm glow upon picking up the wand, the scene was like the two different worlds of imagery and literary colliding, merging and forming a timeless frame of movie in my head. Sweet.

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