The library is in your mind

I think libraries have lost some of their magic.  Or maybe it's just that I'm older and find magic harder to come by, but there was a mystique I used to feel when I went into a well-established (ie, old) library, even when it was just the dimly lit bookmobile that used to stop at the corner near our house when I was a child.  Now libraries are all about technology.  No more card catalogues, no more scouring the reference section for some arcana when you can go check out computer time and look it up online.  Not that that's a bad thing.  It saves a lot of time.  And maybe what I feel when I think about my library experiences of yore is just useless nostalgia.  Because isn't the real magic to be found when you're lost in a book?

Nevertheless, the New York Public Library has been an epitome of Librariness for me since I was a youngster, so I had to stop by there while we were in the City. 

The lions on the steps leading to the library have been there since 1911, and have had 

several names over the years.  Currently, they are known as Patience and Fortitude, 

names given them by Mayor LaGuardia during the Depression.  But I call them 

Fred and George, after my favorite literary twins.

Lots of people were in the library the day we visited.  I wonder how many were 

tourists, like me, or how many had just come inside to escape the 100º weather.

Part of the reference section.  No one's there because 

everyone is looking up stuff on the Internet.

Shannon looks up a word in the dictionary so she can say she actually 

used the library.  (I did, too, but there's no picture.  My word was "alabaster".)