Fforde, Jasper. Lost in a Good Book (New York: Viking, 2002) 399 p.

Special agent Thursday Next finds the Library of the Jurisfiction Dept. which allows her access to the realities of all books.

I was in a long, dark, wood-paneled corridor lined with bookshelves that reached from the richly carpeted floor to the vaulted ceiling.... The library appeared endless; in both directions the corridor vanished into darkness with no definable end. But this wasn’t important. Describing the library would be like going to see a Turner and commenting on the frame. On all of the walls, end after end, shelf after shelf, were books. Hundreds, thousands, millions of books. Hardbacks, paperbacks, leatherbound, uncorrected proofs, handwritten manuscripts, everything. I stepped closer and rested my fingertips lightly against the pristine volumes. They felt warm to the touch, so I leaned closer and pressed my ear to the spines. I could hear a distant hum, the rumble of machinery, people talking, traffic, seagulls, laughter, waves on rocks, wind in the winter branches of trees, distant thunder, heavy rain, children playing, a blacksmith’s hammer-—a million sounds all happening together. And then, in a revelatory moment, the clouds slid back from my mind and a crystal-clear understanding of the very nature of books shone upon me. They weren’t just collections of words arranged neatly on a page to give the impression of reality–each of these volumes was reality. The similarity of these books to the copies I had read back home was no more than the similarity a photograph has to its subject. These books were alive! (p. 174-175).

The librarian is the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. He tells Thursday how to enter the books and warns her of agents who have been lost forever in books.