Card, Orson Scott. Wyrms (New York: TOR, 1988) 345 p.

On a planet where all the Wise people have been called away and enslaved, a small creature of the race of dwelfs gathers knowledge. Her name is Heffiji. She has a very small brain and cannot retain a thought for more than a few seconds, but she devises a system of writing things down and storing the papers where she knows she can find them later. Heffiji is short for Mikias Mikuam Heffiji Ismar which means Never to Lose the finding place. "That’s me, said Heffiji. I don't know anything but I can find everything." (p. 180).

Heffiji's house is in fact a great library. It is here the heroine of the story gains the information she needs to complete her quest. Heffiji's house finally becomes the center of a great university.

Cannell, Dorothy. How to Murder the Man of Your Dreams (New York: Bantam Books, 1995) 292 p.

The narrator, Ellie Haskell, is a frequenter of the Chitterton Fells Library, and a member of the Library League. Legend has it that the library is haunted by the ghost of a man who felt too much reading had ruined his seven daughters' lives. "Miss Bunch, our stalwart librarian, lived at that desk. Rumour had it that she had been born there -- fully grown, already stout, red-faced, and with her hair cropped to an uncompromising bob. I had it on good authority ... that Miss Bunch did not possess a first name. Doubtless her parents had instantly realized the impropriety of attempting to become too familiar with their offspring.

My knees had a tendency to knock on those occasions when I approached Miss Bunch at her desk -- my arms loaded with books whose overdue status would momentarily be calculated down to a percentage of a second. (p. 10-11).

Miss Bunch is found dead in the stacks. The Library League immediately begins fund raising for an appropriate memorial for her. The new librarian is Mrs. Harris, who is described as a Nazi with razor sharp elbows.

Canfield, Dorothy. Hillsboro People (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1915) 346 p.

The good people of Hillsboro Vermont are happy with their quaint old unprofessional library. Every year they stage an entertainment to raise money for new books which are chosen by consent. The town women take turns acting as librarian. When a millionaire from Chicago decides to give them a new and modern library all that changes. An architect is hired to design and build the new Hillsboro Camden Public Library, and Miss Martin, a young librarian from Albany is hired.

She was a very pretty librarian indeed, and she wore her tailor suits with an air which made the village girls look uneasily into their mirrors and made the village boys look after her as she passed. She was moreover as permeated with the missionary fervor instilled into her at the Library School as she was pretty, and she began at once to practice all the latest devices for automatically turning a benighted community into the latest thing in culture. When Mrs. Bradlaugh, wife of the deacon, and president of the Ladies' Aid Society, was confined to the house with a cold, she sent over to the library, as was her wont in such cases, for some entertaining story to while away her tedious convalescence. Miss Martin sent back one of Henry James's novels, and was surprised that Mrs. Bradlaugh made no second attempt to use the library. When the little girls in school asked for the Elsie books, she answered with a glow of pride that the library did not possess one of those silly stories, and offered as substitute, 'Greek Myths for Children.'

Squire Pritchett came, in a great hurry, one morning, and asked for his favorite condensed handbook of geology, in order to identify a stone. He was told that it was entirely out of date and very incomplete, and the library did not own it, and he was referred to the drawer in the card catalogue relating to geology. For a time his stubbed old fingers rambled among the cards, with an ever-rising flood of baffled exasperation. How could he tell by looking at a strange name on a little piece of paper whether the book it represented would tell him about a stone out of his gravel-pit! Finally he appealed to the librarian, who proclaimed on all occasions her eagerness to help inquirers, and she referred him to a handsome great Encyclopedia of Geology in forty-seven volumes. he wandered around hopelessly in this for about an hour, and in the end retreated unenlightened. Miss Martin tried to help him in his search, but, half amused by his rustic ignorance, she asked him finally, with an air of gentle patience, 'how, if he didn't know any of the scientific names, he expected to be able to look up a subject in an alphabetically arranged book?' Squire Pritchett never entered the library again. (p. 197-99).

Another story concerns Jeroboam Mordecai Atterworthy, who left his village to attend Middletown College, and stayed there as the College Librarian the rest of his life.

Cameron, Eleanor. The Unheard Music (Boston: Atlantic; Little, Brown, 1950) 278 p.

The central character of this complex novel is Jane Fielding. Jane works at the St. Albans library where she interacts with many townsfolk and coworkers. The library is mainly described by its smell.

He felt, rather than pictured in his imagination, the golden afternoon light filling the high-ceilinged room with its two ells extending away behind him on either hand as he stood at the desk facing her. He smelled the unforgettable, closed-in smell of the library, a queer mixture of the varnish they used on the cork covering of the floor, of dust faintly, of the books, the print, the soiled paper that had been turned a million times by a million grimy thumbs.

The library had smelled like that ever since he could remember, because it was old and musty and had grown dirty in the corners during all these years. (p. 25).

Jane's take on the library smell includes “the faint reminder of the men's public rest room under the stairway.” (p. 67).

Jane is friends with the head librarian, “Toppy,” Mrs. Topping. Because of this Maud Coombs feels Jane is able to slack off on her work. Other employees include the childrens librarian Phoebe Tripp, G.A., Timothy (who wants to marry Jane), and Claude. Jane suspects she will be offered the job of head librarian when Toppy retires but does not feel up to the challenges. The dingy smelly old building needs repairs. The library board is always cutting the budget and refusing salary raises. She mostly feels inadequate to the task of maintaining equanimity while dealing with all the emotional needs of the library staff.

Cambor, Kathleen. In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001) 258 p.

Grace McIntyre attended Radcliffe and trained as a librarian. She was hired right out of college by Harvard. She was stifled by her life in Boston though, and in 1881 slipped away from her husband and took a job in Johnstown, Pennsylvania as the assistant librarian. She helped the aging Mrs. Hirst in organizing a new library stocked with 7,000 new books.

Grace is tall and pretty with full lips and a wide generous mouth. She tutors a young boy in Greek and then becomes friends with his mother and his father.

Callander, Don. Dragon Companion (New York: Ace Books, 1994) 321 p.

Tom Whitehead, a librarian at the Library of Congress, suddenly finds himself one day in a world of dragons and wizards. He is befriended by a dragon and gets a job as Librarian for the local lord, Murdan the Historian. He reorganizes the castle archives. He also impresses everyone with his ability to find information and find non-magical solutions to difficult problems. Tom's adventures continue in Dragon Rescue (New York: Ace, 1995) and Dragon Tempest (New York: Ace, 1998).

Calderón, Emilio. The Creator's Map (New York: Penguin, 2008) 259 p. Originally published in Spanish as El Mapa del Creador (Barcelona: Roca, 2006) translated by Katherine Silver.

In 1937 the Spanish Academy in Rome is being run by the secretary of the Spanish embassy. Secretary Olarra is a graduate of the Vatican School of Library Science, but he neglects the Spanish Academy library in order to concentrate on translating the Vatican Library cataloging rules into Spanish. The Academy students sell off valuable books from the library to raise money. One of these students, Montserrat (called “Montse”) is later hired as a librarian at the Palazzo Corsini. Father Giordano Sansovino is a librarian at the Vatican Library. He explains a problem with the library.

...the library contains more than a million and a half volumes, a hundred fifty thousand manuscripts, as many maps, and sixty thousand codices in about thirty collections. Out of all of that, we know the contents of only about five thousand, even though we've been cataloging since 1902. One person cannot catalog more than ten a year. It takes a long time to read, check, systemize their contents, so it will be another century before we can know what is really hiding in the Vatican Library. (p. 80).

This is why the library is the perfect place to hide documents.