Celebrate National Library Week with a book!

The Library Book

Susan Orlean

On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was Goodbye, Charlie.”

The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library… and if so, who?

Dewey
The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World

Vicki Myron, Bret Witter

The story of Dewey Readmore Books, the beloved library cat, starts in the worst possible way. Only a few weeks old, on the coldest night of the year, he was stuffed into the book return slot at the Spencer, Iowa, Public Library. He was found the next morning by library director, Vicki Myron, a single mother who had survived the loss of her family farm, a breast cancer scare, and an alcoholic husband.

Dewey won her heart, and the hearts of the staff, by pulling himself up and hobbling on frostbitten feet to nudge each of them in a gesture of thanks and love. For the next nineteen years, he never stopped charming the people of Spencer with his enthusiasm, warmth, humility (for a cat), and, above all, his sixth sense about who needed him most.

The World’s Strongest Librarian
A Memoir of Tourette’s, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family

Josh Hanagarne

An inspiring story of how a Mormon kid with Tourette’s found salvation in books and weight-lifting.

Today, Josh is a librarian in the main branch of Salt Lake City’s public library and founder of a popular blog about books and weight lifting—and the proud father of four-year-old Max, who has already started to show his own symptoms of Tourette’s. The World’s Strongest Librarian illuminates the mysteries of this little-understood disorder, as well as the very different worlds of strongman training and modern libraries. With humor and candor, this unlikely hero traces his journey to overcome his disability—and navigate his wavering Mormon faith—to find love and create a life worth living.

Dewey’s Nine Lives
The Legacy of the Small-Town Library Cat Who Inspired Millions

Vicki Myron, Bret Witter

The author of the best-selling Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World provides a new collection of inspiring cat stories, including a few more stories about Dewey himself, a tale about a divorced mother that saved a drowning kitten on Christmas Eve and more.

Running the Books
The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian

Avi Steinberg

A Harvard graduate and lapsed Orthodox Jew chronicles his stint as a librarian in a tough Boston prison, where he met such inmates as a pimp who enlisted his help writing a memoir and a gangster who dreamed of hosting a cooking show.

Syria’s Secret Library
Reading and Redemption in a Town Under Siege

Mike Thomson

The award-winning BBC News presenter traces the remarkable story of a secret makeshift library in the Syrian town of Darayya, where visitors risked their lives to read throughout the devastating height of the Syrian Civil War.

Free for All
Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library

Don Borchert

The author recounts his experiences working as an assistant librarian in a public library in suburban Los Angeles, as he encounters patrons who range from bored latchkey kids left there for the afternoon, to rowdy teenagers, to Internet-obsessed adults, to drug-dealers.

Reading Behind Bars
A True Story of Literature, Law, and Life as a Prison Librarian

Jill Grunenwald

As a recent graduate with a master’s degree in library science, the author takes one of the only librarian jobs left in the state of Ohio, in a prison, where she learns that the inmates are like any library patron looking for books.

Patience and Fortitude
Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library

Scott Sherman

An award-winning reporter investigates the New York Public Library’s highly controversial entanglements with money and big real estate as the beloved institution became caught between power and the people’s interests.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu
And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts

Joshua Hammer

To save precious centuries-old Islamic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven.

The Book Thieves
The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

Anders Rydell

An account of the Nazis’ systematic pillaging of Europe’s libraries, and the heroic efforts of librarians working today to return the books to their owners, explores how stolen books were used as part of a campaign to rewrite history in accordance with Third Reich views.

America’s Library
The Story of the Library of Congress, 1800-2000

James Conaway

Traces the history of the Library of Congress under the leadership of each of the men who have been appointed as Librarian of Congress and discusses how the Library’s collections have reflected American political and intellectual developments.

Libraries in the Ancient World

Lionel Casson

This delightful book tells the story of ancient libraries from their very beginnings, when “books” were clay tablets and writing was a new phenomenon. Renowned classicist Lionel Casson takes us on a lively tour, from the royal libraries of the most ancient Near East, through the private and public libraries of Greece and Rome, down to the first Christian monastic libraries. To the founders of the first public libraries of the Greek world goes the credit for creating the prototype of today’s library buildings and the science of organizing books in them.

The Midnight Library

Matt Haig

Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?

The Paris Library

Janet Skeslien Charles

Paris, 1939. Young, ambitious, and tempestuous, Odile Souchet has it all: Paul, her handsome police officer beau; Margaret, her best friend from England; her adored twin brother Remy; and a dream job at the American Library in Paris, working alongside the library’s legendary director, Dorothy Reeder.

But when World War II breaks out, Odile stands to lose everything she holds dear—including her beloved library. After the invasion, as the Nazis declare a war on words and darkness falls over the City of Light, Odile and her fellow librarians join the Resistance with the best weapons they have: books. They risk their lives again and again to help their fellow Jewish readers.

Based on the true story of the American Library in Paris, The Paris Library explores the geography of resentment, the consequences of terrible choices made, and how extraordinary heroism can be found in the quietest of places.

The Library of Lost and Found

Phaedra Patrick

A shy librarian whose kind heart is often exploited receives a mysterious book of fairy tales from the beloved grandmother she believed dead and embarks on a perspective-changing journey of astonishing family secrets.

The Invisible Library

Genevieve Cogman

An undercover librarian who works for an occult organization that collects books from different realities must determine what happened to a particularly dangerous book that has been stolen and becomes mired in a mystery infused with peril and conflicting clues.

The Library of the Unwritten

A.J. Hackwith

Many years ago, Claire was named head librarian of the Unwritten Wing—a neutral space in Hell where all the stories unfinished by their authors reside. Her job consists mainly of repairing and organizing books, but also of keeping an eye on restless stories that risk materializing as characters and escaping the Library.

When a hero escapes from his book and goes in search of its author, Claire must track and capture him with the help of former muse and current assistant Brevity and the nervous and sweet demon Leto. But what should have been a simple retrieval goes horrifyingly wrong when the terrifying angel Ramiel attacks them, convinced that they hold the Devil’s Bible.

The Library at the Edge of the World

Felicity Hayes-McCoy

Returning home after her divorce, librarian Hanna Casey is determined to reclaim her independence, but with the threatened closure of the local library she finds herself leading a battle to heal the community.

Murder at the 42nd Street Library

Con Lehane

When a murder happens on the second floor of New York Public Library’s 42nd Street branch, Ray Ambler, curator of the crime fiction collection, joins homicide detective Mike Cosgrove in his investigation.

Summer Hours at the Robbers Library

Susan Halpern

Head librarian Kit has her quiet existence disrupted when a local, homeschooled teen, desperate for contact with people other than her hippie parents, is arrested for shoplifting a dictionary and is forced to do community service at the library.

The Paris Librarian

Mark Pryor

Hugo Marston’s friend Paul Rogers dies unexpectedly in a locked room at the American Library in Paris. The police conclude that Rogers died of natural causes, but Hugo is certain mischief is afoot.

As he pokes around the library, Hugo discovers that rumors are swirling around some recently donated letters from American actress Isabelle Severin. The reason: they indicate that the actress had aided the resistance in frequent trips to France towards the end of World War II. Even more dramatic is the legend that the Severin Collection also contains a dagger, one she used to kill an SS officer in 1944.

Hugo delves deeper into the stacks at the American library and finally realizes that the history of this case isn’t what anyone suspected. But to prove he’s right, Hugo must return to the scene of a decades-old crime.

The Lending Library

Aliza Fogelson

When the Chatsworth library closes indefinitely, small-town art teacher Dodie Fairisle turns her sunroom into her very own little lending library, which leads to both new friendships and romance, as well as an unexpected chance to realize her secret dream of motherhood.

The Bodies in the Library

Marty Wingate

Hayley Burke has landed a dream job. She is the new curator of Lady Georgiana Fowling’s First Edition library. The library is kept at Middlebank House, a lovely Georgian home in Bath, England.

Hayley lives on the premises and works with the finicky Glynis Woolgar, Lady Fowling’s former secretary. Mrs. Woolgar does not like Hayley’s ideas to modernize The First Edition Society and bring in fresh blood. And she is not even aware of the fact that Hayley does not know the first thing about the Golden Age of Mysteries.

Hayley is faking it till she makes it, and one of her plans to breathe new life into the Society is actually taking flight—an Agatha Christie fan fiction writers group is paying dues to meet up at Middlebank House. But when one of the group is found dead in the venerable stacks of the library, Hayley has to catch the killer to save the Society and her new job.

The Librarian of Boone’s Hollow

Kim Vogel Sawyer

A traveling librarian who delivers books on horseback to the superstitious coal-mining communities of Depression-era Kentucky bonds with a local man who has been shunned for pursuing an education.

The Body in the Library
A Miss Marple Mystery

Agatha Christie

A young, blond woman is found dead on the floor of Colonel and Mrs. Bantry’s library. Nobody seems to know who the woman is, let alone how she wound up murdered in the Bantry’s home. Jane Marple is called in and the chase is on.

Librarians and the Lost Lamp

Greg Cox

When the new team of Librarians investigates a case in Las Vegas, they find it is connected to a case ten years earlier when the Forty tried to track down and steal Aladdin’s fabled lamp, and the powerful, malevolent djinn within it.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

Kim Michele Richardson

Cussy Mary Carter is the last of her kind, her skin the color of a blue damselfly in these dusty hills. But that doesn’t mean she’s got nothing to offer. As a member of the Pack Horse Library Project, Cussy delivers books to the hill folk of Troublesome, hoping to spread learning in these desperate times. But not everyone is so keen on Cussy’s family or the Library Project, and the hardscrabble Kentuckians are quick to blame a Blue for any trouble in their small town.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creekis a story of raw courage, fierce strength, and one woman’s determination to bring a little bit of hope to the darkly hollers.