Doderer, Heimito von. The Demons (New York: Knopf, 1961) 2 v., 1334 p. Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston.

A young factory worker in Vienna named Leonhard Kakabsa decides to learn Latin. He buys a Latin grammar and drills himself diligently. This activity has the unexpected benefit of developing a “greater skill in the manipulation and separation of ideas” (p. 577). One day he realizes he can read Latin and that he thinks as an educated man.

Leonhard begins to frequent the university library where he develops a friendship with a young scholar named René Stangeler. Later, Stangeler is invited to Castle Neudegg by it’s owner, Prince Jan Herzka. Stangeler so impresses Herzka with his translation of a medieval manuscript that he offers him the position of librarian at Neudegg.

Kakabsa meets Prince Alfons Croix who is immediately impressed by the former’s intelligence. Croix tells Kakabsa, “I have long been searching for a librarian. I don’t want a middle-class academician reeking of general education. I want someone with native wit—he can go ahead and study and attain his doctorate—of course at my expense and with my assistance.” (p. 1101). And so Leonhard Kakabsa moves into a suite of rooms at the Palais Croix to take up his duties as librarian.

Dobson, Joanne. The Maltese Manuscript (Scottsdale, AZ: Poisoned Pen Press, 2003) 275 p.

Enfield College's library boasts a fabulous collection of detective fiction. Curator of Special Collections Rachel Thompson is "tall and full bodied" (p. 26), "Live, vivid" (p. 267). She is trying to keep it quiet that the library has lost five hundred thousand dollars worth of rare first editions and manuscripts including a draft of The Maltese Falcon with Dashiell Hammett's handwritten corrections. But when a scholar is found dead in the closed stacks the police investigate.

Librarian Nellie Applegate is just the opposite of Rachel. She is "small, dry as dust" (p. 28), an "insubstantial wraith" (p. 267). She also plays her part in the mysterious goings on at the library. But the crucial investigation is carried out by a professor and a mystery writer when they break into the library.

Row after row of tall shelves stretched back into the shadows seemingly into infinity. I had a sudden eerie sense of disconnection from the present, as if we had somehow escaped the confines of time and matter and entered simultaneously into all the worlds pressed in ink and bound into these volumes, as if we had penetrated the collective consciousness of brains long since reduced to scattered molecules of insensate matter. (p. 237).

This magical mystical world becomes the scene of denouement.

Doctorow, E.L. Ragtime (New York: Bantam Books, 1976) 369 p.

The J. Pierpont Morgan Library is occupied by a group of black terrorists seeking justice for a black man who was harassed by a group of racist volunteer fire fighters.

Dickens, Charles. Martin Chuzzlewit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951) 841 p.

Tom Pinch (p. 605-617) is mysteriously and anonymously given a job cataloging a private library.

In the meantime Tom attended to his duties daily, and made considerable progress with the books: which were already reduced to some sort of order, and made a great appearance in his fairly-written catalogue. During his business hours, he indulged himself occasionally with snatches of reading; which were often, indeed, a necessary part of his pursuit; and as he usually made bold to carry one of these goblin volumes home at night (always bringing it back again next morning, in case his strange employer should appear and ask what had become of it), he led a happy, quiet, studious kind of life, after his own heart. (p. 619).

Dick, Philip K. Counter-Clock World (London: Coronet Books, Hodder and Stoughton, 1977, c1967) 158 p.

For some reason time has reversed. Dead people come back to life. Infants return to the womb. People disgorge food. Some of them pick up cigarette butts and blow smoke into them until they are long and unsmoked. In this world one function of the People's Topical Library is the destruction of books when time had reversed to the point where they had been written. The Head Librarian is Mavis McGuire. She is “bitchy, hostile, and mean.” (p. 15).

Douglas Appleford is the librarian in charge of Section B where manuscripts are eradicated. He is “a stuffy, formal but reasonably helpful person; certainly far more easily dealt with than Mavis McGuire.” (p. 22). “'Our job here at the library,' Appleford said, 'Is not to study and/or memorize data; it is to expunge it.'” (p. 26).

Later it becomes clear that the People's Topical Library is a far more sinister organization. A newspaper reports that as many as three people a month disappear behind its walls. Everyone who works for the library eventually ends up in the “Children's Department,” from which armies of dwindled adults are deployed to enforce library policy.

Diamant, Anita. Good Harbor (New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 2002) 251 p.

Kathleen Levine is a middle-aged children’s librarian with breast cancer. She is good at helping children find books they will enjoy reading. The new rabbi recruits her to develop a synagogue library.

Dexter, Colin. The Wench is Dead (London: St. Martin's, 1989) 200 p.

Christine Greenaway is a beautiful young blond reference librarian in the Bodleian Library's Lower Reading Room. "... her daily duties demanded assistance to both senior and junior members of the University: checking slips, identifying shelf-marks, suggesting reference-sections, making and taking phone calls (one, yesterday, from the University of Uppsala). And over these last years she had felt a sense of importance and enjoyment in her job - of functioning happily in the working of the University" (p. 64).