Magic & Madness in the Library : Protagonists Among the Stacks

by Eric Graeber (editor)

Classic fiction and "finds" on real and imagined libraries through the minds of Cervantes, Voltaire, Borges, Woolf, Bradbury, King, Eco, Irving, Huxley and more.

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 1998

Reviews

[Josh Boggs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Note to self: read Candide, Looking Backward, Crome Yellow, and the works of Borges and Edmund Lester Pearson.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm embarrassed to say I have owned this book for over 20 years and just read it for the first time. It's a nice little anthology spotlighting the library in literature. From home libraries of bygone ages to the allegory of library as universe, this little book highlights famous authors and their use of libraries in their work.
I obviously purchased it ages ago because it features Huxley, but I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy almost all of the excerpts. Donald S. Olson's Hold for Arrival was my favorite.