Byatt, A.S. Possession: a Romance (New York: Random House, 1990) 555 p.

Libraries are never far from center stage in this tale of literary scholarship. A young scholar makes a surprising discovery in the Reading Room of the London Library. Beatrice Nest is a librarian of sorts, being keeper of a collection of literary papers.

Busch, Frederick. Invisible Mending (Boston: David R. Godine, 1984) 277 p.

Rhona Glinsky is a librarian at a branch of the New York Public Library. Her research skills come in handy as she hunts for Nazi war criminals.

Burr, Anna Robeson. The Jessop Bequest (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907) 401 p.

Although a librarian is not named the local public library provides the setting for the meeting of two protagonists.

The Chillingworth Library had successfully resisted all attempts at modernization. From the building itself, a gray, palladian structure standing back from the street in a weedy waste of garden, to the old-fashioned stands and tables within, everything about it marked a slumbering defiance of progressive methods. Books were still its main furnishing, contrary to that modern custom which provides a library interior only with desks, chairs, tablets, green lampshades, and frescoes. Here, instead of filling out a slip asking your age, name, income, creed, weight, and degree of myopia, which you deposit in a pneumatic tube, to receive in return a predigested tabloid volume such as library authorities consider befits your case, – here, persons of ripe age and established morals were permitted to browse undisturbed over the shelves. It is true you might or might not find the book of which you were in search; but at least you spent a desultory and agreeable half-hour.

The catalogue methods of the Chillingworth library were such as to discourage culture. There was a catalogue, a time-worn volume in microscopic print, wherein “The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt” was listed under “Anonymous,” and Swedenborg's “Heaven and Hell” under “Works of Imagination and Fancy.” This superannuated authority was backed up by a few drawers of cards, in which the letter K stood represented by “Keats, John, Life & Works of, 61,107,590 AB, 2.” If you could remember this number and send it in, you might be quite sure of receiving a copy of “Elsie Dinsmore.” Repeated trials destroyed your confidence in catalogics, if there is such a science, so you usually preferred to hunt your book yourself. Such a hunt brought other game besides your quarry. You wondered who it was kept out “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” that prodigious monument of dullness, or why “The Anatomy of Melancholy” was placed in the medical section.

It was only the really busy, however, who complained, and it is conceded a library is no place for them. The society in its walls is the only leisure class in the world; its inmates have all time at their backs; and we have no business to affront them by our hurried counting of moments. One grew attached to the very faults of this place, to its dusty, dusky, dingy interior. The main room was not large, with twisted iron staircases running up to the book galleries. There were battered, old-fashioned tables and book stands; dingy plaster busts of Shakespeare and Sophocles, fly-specked water-colors of revolutionary battles. Behind the counter presided an exhausted librarian, who seemed tacitly to echo the weary cry of King Solomon. (p. 59-60).

This is where young Diana Jessop, who has aspirations beyond small town life, comes to refresh her mind.

Burks, Allison L. Tight Rope (London: William Heinemann, 1947) 191 p.

A young woman is hired to stand in for a dead heiress in the California seaside town of Trentville. To relax she likes to visit the local circulating library. She becomes friends with the librarian, Anne Delahay. “She had soft fair hair, wide grey eyes and a low clear voice.” (p. 7). 

Browne, Marshall. Inspector Anders and the Ship of Fools (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002) 320 p.

On the trail of European terrorists, Interpol detectives consult documents in the Libraire Kleber in Strasbourg. “He clanked upwards caged in iron and brass, and entered a huge room which appeared to take up most of the second floor – a mezzanine overlooked it. Aisles of bookshelves ranged away, creaking with book-weight, smelling of old leather. Under-funded and municipal…. Largely devoid of human beings. Though scores could’ve been beavering silently away in the maze-like aisles.” (p. 85). The librarian, Dr. Marguerite Dauban, was “about thirty-seven. A face the creamy hue of gardenias, devoid of cosmetics. Yes, careless hair, nonetheless a faint perfume emanating from it. Her mouth was as straightforward, humanitarian, and commonsense as Anders had ever seen.” (p. 86). Dr. Dauban lets Inspector Anders study the library’s 1499 edition of The Ship of Fools. As Inspector Anders works with this “woman of both sharp comments and soft looks” (p. 142), he becomes attracted to her and she to him.

Browne, Douglas G. Death in Seven Volumes (London: MacDonald, 1958) 192 p.

Roger Gournay is the Librarian of the London Library. When he discovers that some obscure philosophy books have been replaced with non-library copies he consults the police and an investigation is launched. It turns out that someone has inserted a coded message into the library set. One of those mysterious chases through the stacks occurs on p. 120-28.

Brown, Eleanor. The Weird Sisters (New York: Amy Einhorn Books, c2011) 320 p.

Three daughters of a Shakespearean scholar are named Rosalind, Bianca and Cordelia Andreas. As children they pull their little red wagon to the library every week because they love to read. When the girls, now grown, come home to be with their dying Mother, Bianca (known as Bean) visits the library again.

Mrs. Landrige, the librarian who had been here in the red-wagon days, had been white-haired and stooped even then, but Bean could see her at the desk, stamping library cards with a patient hand. Bean felt a rush of sweet nostalgia for the woman who had introduced us to E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and she found herself desperately wanting to give the old woman a hug, not that Mrs. Landrige would have trucked with that. Mrs. Landrige, as a point of fact, didn't truck with much. (p. 47).

Later Mrs. Landrige asks Bean to stand in as librarian temporarily while she goes in for a hip replacement.

“But I don't know anything about it. I mean, I don't have the right degree.”

Mrs. Landrige, had she worn glasses, would have looked over the rims at Bean. “Don't be ridiculous. It's the Barnwell Public Library, not the Library of Congress. You've been coming here since before you could walk, and I trust you implicitly. (p. 181).

So Bean becomes the Barnwell (which she thinks of as Barney) librarian. Her first act is to buy computers and automate.

Bean sat down at the desk and pulled a long drawer of the card catalog over to her. She could do nothing to change Barney, she knew. Turning the blond wood of the card catalog into the binary code of a computer catalog was only cosmetic, would alter nothing at the heart of the town, which would still creep in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, but she could change her place in it. (p. 311).

I don't know what ever happened to Mrs. Landrige.