Goodrum, Charles. Dewey Decimated (New York: Crown, 1977) 190 p.

  -------. Carnage of the Realm (New York: Crown, 1979) 152 p.

  -------. The Best Cellar (New York: St. Martin's, 1987) 218 p.

  -------. A Slip of the Tong (New York: St. Martin's, 1992) 180 p.

These all take place at the Werner-Bok Library, a fictitious private institution in Washington, D.C. Betty Crighton Jones, a young but exceptionally intelligent librarian works as Public Relations Officer at the Werner-Bok. She is assisted in solving mysteries by Dr. Edward George, the Librarian Emeritus of Yale University. Dewey Decimated and A Slip of the Tong deal with theft of rare books from the library. Each of these stories features some detailed information on various aspects of the library world: shared online cataloging, processing of gift materials, security, etc.

Goldstein, Lisa. Summer King, Winter Fool (New York: TOR, c1994) 274 p.

In this fantasy world of wizards and poet-mages the great library of Tobol An has survived for centuries. A beautiful woman named Taja works there. The library is a tower shaped like a shell spiraling upward. “Unbound manuscripts and loose rotting pages and scrolls competed for space with books bound in brass and iron and jewels.” (p. 33). 

Glancy, Diane. Designs of the Night Sky (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, c2002) 157 p.

Ada Ronner is a librarian in the Manuscripts and Rare Books Dept. at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. She muses on the differences between books and traditional Cherokee storytellers. 

Gill, Bartholomew. The Death of an Ardent Bibliophile (New York: William Morrow, 1995) 275 p.

Brian Herrick, the eccentric Keeper of Marsh's Library in Dublin is murdered in his home amid his private book collection. The deputy keeper is Charlotte Bing, a "tall, pretty, older woman" with ash-blond hair. "In contrast to her conventional appearance--low heels, the tweed suit, the high pile of ashen hair, and wire-frame eyeglasses--Charlotte Bing had a low, dulcet, and contained voice that McGarr found rather pleasing. He imagined that with another costume and a ... makeover, she might appear quite attractive." (p. 13). She suspects that Herrick has been stealing rare volumes from the library and replacing them with "period forgeries." The history and present state of the Marsh Library is related on pages 162-167.

Giles, Molly. Iron Shoes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) 239 p.

Kay Sorensen gave up dreams of being a concert pianist and now works in a small branch library threatened with closure. The head librarian Mrs. Holland is friendly but hopeless with computers.

She loved the little West Valley branch library, but you couldn’t make a life out of a place that was doomed to close soon. She thought of her morning at work—she’d read Henny Penny to a class of preschoolers, led Mrs. Holland through six trial Web searches, fixed the Xerox machine, handed a Kleenex to the homeless man sneezing behind the Wall Street Journal, cleaned out a cache of Kentucky Fried Chicken bones some teenagers had picnicked on in the Nature Nook, helped old Mr. Giddings find a magazine article on kickboxing, pinned autumn leaves and cutouts of Thanksgiving turkeys all over the bulletin boards, reshelved a cartload of murder mysteries, and fed the goldfish. None of that seemed like work. (p. 92).

Giguère, Diane. Wings in the Wind (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, c1979) 108 p. Originally published as Dans les Ailes du Vent, 1976. Translated by Alan Brown.

In the first part of this novel a woman named Amédée broods on the meaninglessness of life.

At times the world seems like a vast impersonal library. My life is just a card in one of the many drawers where our imperfections, weaknesses, and failures are compiled. There are years that will never be erased, words that can never be withdrawn and years impossible to recapture. Death, oddly enough, is not punctual, does not strike in mid-sleep and as I prepare to write in my careful archivist's hand, “November 22, 1974,” I can see the black hole, the cavity where I shall be swallowed up, the darkness of souls dispossessed. (p. 45-46).

Gifford, Thomas. The Wind Chill Factor (New York: Ballantine, 1976) 376 p.

Paula Smithies is a young, pretty librarian in Cooper’s Falls, Minnesota.