We Love Libraries! The Best Books about Libraries and Librarians

Late one night, exploring her father’s library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to “My dear and unfortunate successor,” and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of—a labyrinth where the secrets of her father’s past and her mother’s mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.

As Barcelona slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son, finds solace in what he finds in the “Cemetery of Forgotten Books”: a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, his seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets—an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.

Is time a parabola? If you asked the couple at the heart of this remarkable story, Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course, they'd probably both say yes. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.

The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by a series of bizarre deaths that mimic the Book of Revelation, Brother William turns detective.

“I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.”
Winner of England’s Booker Prize and the literary sensation of 1990, Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany—what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.

Forced to put up with crude and distant parents, Matilda takes refuge in her love of reading. She expects school to be different but there she has to face Miss Trunchbull, a kid-hating terror of a headmistress. When she is attacked by the Trunchbull she suddenly discovers she has a remarkable power with which to fight back.

Written before the emergence of the Internet but newly updated for the modern reader, A Gentle Madness captures that last moment in time when collectors pursued their passions in dusty bookshops and street stalls and high stakes auctions. The passion and expense these collectors are willing to make in pursuit of a book will astonish and delight you.

Those who predicted the death of libraries forgot to consider that we need librarians, the only ones who can save us from being buried by the digital age. This romp through the ranks of information professionals celebrates these pragmatic idealists who fuse the tools of the digital age with their love for the written word and the enduring values of free speech and open access.

This ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript, from fifteenth-century Spain to war-torn Bosnia. It falls to a renowned book conservator and a young librarian who risked his live to save it to discover its secrets and piece together the mystery of its miraculous survival.