Griffith, Michael. Bibliophilia (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2003) p. 1-136.

This novella, published with five short stories, concerns a university in New Orleans. Myrtle is a recently hired reference librarian who lost her job as librarian at a law firm after long years of service. The head of the university library, Mort Bozeman, is obsessed with controlling reading material of a prurient nature. He keeps all such books (the list is long and includes books of art reproductions, Rabelais, and Oscar Wilde) in a locked case behind his desk. Readers need to come and explain to him why they want to check them out.

Mort becomes convinced that students are engaging in sexual acts in the library. He assigns Myrtle the task of patrolling the stacks and curtailing this behavior. To this end Myrtle acquires a very large flashlight and enrolls in a bouncer class at a local bar.

Myrtle was something of a wild girl in her own college years. She recalls the librarian of her time, Miss Ivy Berryhill,

... who had seemed to Myrtle the brittlest husk of womanhood imaginable. Miss Berryhill wore her never-cut gray-yellow hair thickly braided and crossed and recrossed over the top of her head. The braids looked like ship's hawsers, ropes as broad as a longshoreman's arm and as strong. The only changes in her appearance over the years seemed to be the addition of ever more plaits and coils and a tiny shift, perhaps (there were those, boosters of her myth, who would dispute this), in the ratio of gray to yellow. She was Medusa tightly corseted, her serpenty tresses tamed and snugged in with two dozen hairpins. Her forehead was stretched taut, and every blink or scowl looked like it might set off a chain reaction of popping pins. Miss Berryhill wore sack dresses that appeared to have been made of bedspreads thriftily resurrected; she took austere pleasure in sucking lemon-menthol candies that swathed her in an aura of medicine chest, lightly sweetened. She was lean and hard-edged, a battle-ax in button-up shoes, and she had the longest, yellowest, most spatulate fingers Myrtle had ever seen, as if made – natural selection at work – for the task of violent shushing, at which Miss Berryhill was singularly gifted." (p. 29-30).

With her new assignment Myrtle fears she is becoming Miss Berryhill.

Another member of the library staff is Seti, a student from Egypt who is very idealistic and confused by American culture.