Second Aristh If anything, the blasting rod or wand is more for evocation. Harry often describes it more like a multi-tool to serve multiple purposes. Yeah...but he didn't write it when he was born or a novice either. It's not like he would have even written a book until he was at least somewhat of an expert, which would take a while. Per WOJ, while he was young he was running around being more violent that Harry! I doubt he was sitting around writing books too. By the time he would have got around to writing the book, he would have been quite a bit older than Harry. Considered a master, if you like. Otherwise why would any of them read it? They would have more than enough information from literally thousands of years of experimentation and gathering of knowledge. So it's shrinks the amount of time considerably when he could have written it, by which time most of the Council at the point Harry makes the comment would have passed their beginner phase.

If you really believe it's a throwaway line, up to you. But so far you haven't provided any evidence to the contrary and this thread is for speculation. Read the books how you like, but some of us enjoy putting the puzzle together and finding the clues.

Multiple evocation purposes, yes.  A blasting rod is also an evocation tool, but for a more specialized category of spells.  It's pretty standard procedure to seek advice on teaching evocation magic from the WC's best evocation wizard.  Probably even pick up a copy of his book from Edinburgh for your new apprentice.  A century is plenty of time for information to travel.  We already saw some of Eb's writing with his full sets of journals.  It's easy enough to take some time to write down some of your philosophies and thoughts on magic that you'd share with other wizards.

A magic encyclopedia is gonna inject fight conversations with trivia.  Ivy did the same thing in SmF at the Shedd.  It doesn't necessarily make the trivia a secret clue; maybe you just understand a bit more about the subject character from a slightly different perspective.


Also, Bob is a thousand year old being by WoJ, Bad Alias.

It's just a nice easter egg for the readers, yeah.  Nothing especially noteworthy with respect to Harry.

Yes, buy Yuillegan's question isn't about inconsequential reasons why Evil Bob would know about it. The question is why would Jim put that in there. Probably not because Evil Bob looked it up in a book.

I mean, the simplest reason is Evil Bob was giving an assessment of the magical work on the staff.  It doesn't scream any non-inconsequential reasons to me.  McCoy's style of evocation magic is well-known.

Yoshimo was one of the baby wardens in DB, she's younger than Harry. 

Chandler is the only named wizard I can think of that might be closer to the 50-150 range than Luccio (excluding Harry), but mostly because we don't have a firm age for him.  Ancient Mai has a messenger apprentice, but we don't really have much on him.

Evanna mentions explosions started the fire in the building.  That's not Thomas's style at all.  Especially if he wasn't planning on getting caught.  An assassin posing as a svartalf could pin that on Thomas with enough chaos.  Thomas could have gone to Etri to negotiate to be Harry's new neighbor.  Parenthood probably pushed his buttons into wanting more security than his apartment to raise a child.

Plus Austri seemed to get along pretty well with Thomas; if he recognized the assassin as Not!Thomas, he would have to go.

Luccio is the closest we know to that range, I think.  It's hard to place Steed's age, though.

There is quite literally an "s" in Justine.