Greenbaum, Leonard. Out of Shape (New York: Harper & Row, 1969) 247 p.

This mystery takes place at the fictitious Milton State University, but it is clearly the University of Michigan. The library plays its part on p. 30-34.

The library stacks were a restful spot, a place to renew, to cast back, to see new possibilities. Looking up among the tiers of books rising ten stories through the floors, flipping the crackling papers from another century, listening to the soft pat-pat of shoes on the iron stairs, Thomas let his mind wander across the span of history into the eclectic categories of the Dewey Decimal System. When he was beset by problems, be they momentary or of long duration, deep or shallow, it was to the library stacks that his tilting feet led him, to pick up a copy of Shackleton's account of the ill-fated voyage of the brig Endurance, to study an anthropological monograph that pinpointed an ancient Indian burial mound under the coal pile outside his room, to touch upon the dry pages of Hound & Horn, unchanged in forty years. It was here in the stacks, where the rush of the world was muted by the accumulation of the past, that Thomas reached his most peaceful moments. Walden to Thoreau, Dover Beach to Arnold, LSD to Leary. None could touch the library stacks.