# Help me stock the ultimate (fictional) library **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** books-writing-myths\ **Created:** [October 16, 2013, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444 "2013-10-16T23:07:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![Wargamer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/df705f/32.png) [@Wargamer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wargamer)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2019, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/141 "2019-01-10T14:48:18Z")
_Hot Tub High School_ for the DVD section. I hear Chloe Decker is gonna be a BIG star. ---
**Author:** ![Quercus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/7ab992/32.png) [@Quercus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quercus)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2019, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/142 "2019-01-10T16:00:14Z")
How about Don Quixote, the Pierre Menard version? ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2019, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/143 "2019-01-11T14:49:03Z")
Dreams of a Prodigal Child by John Dorman, mentioned in The Gift of Asher Lev. The only book published by the author, who continually writes, so maybe you could find and published the others. ---
**Author:** ![Bibliothecarius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/b2d939/32.png) [@Bibliothecarius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bibliothecarius)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 11:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/144 "2019-01-16T11:45:52Z")
If you’re into the _Necronomicon_, I recommend: From the _Supernatural_ universe: John Winchester’s journal Samuel Colt’s journal The Winchester Gospel Book of Shadows Book of Spells Book of Fenris The Black Grimoire The Book of the Damned The Demon Tablet The Angel Tablet The Leviathan Tablet The Ledger of the Thules On the Inner Workings of Angels by James Haggerty Everything in the Men of Letters bunker God: An Autobiography by God From the _Buffy_verse: The Slayer Handbook A Treatise on the Mythology and Methodology of the Vampire Slayer Various and sundry Watchers’ diaries The Pergamum Codex The Scrolls of Aberjian The Books of Ascension The Merenshtadt Text Darkest Magick The Necronomicon des Mortes The Nyazian Scrolls The Black Chronicles The Magdalene Grimoire The Gutenberg Demonography The Brekenkrieg Grimoire The Tome of Moloch Bynum’s History of Witchcraft Bristow’s Demon Index Exploring Demon Dimensions Dreadhost’s Compendium of Immortal Leeches Hochstadter’s Treatise on Fractal Geometry in 12-dimensional Space Hume’s Paranormal Encyclopedia The Xiochimayan Codex The Book of Kelsor Everything in Giles’ library That oughta keep ya busy for a while… 😃 ---
**Author:** ![burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/burpo_the_wonder_mutt/32/365_2.png) [@burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/burpo_the_wonder_mutt)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/145 "2019-01-16T15:54:24Z")
This should take up most of a shelf: Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Houses Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Castles by [Mike Enslin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1408_(short_story)) ---
**Author:** ![Dendarii\_Dame](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/bbce88/32.png) [@Dendarii\_Dame](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dendarii_Dame)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/146 "2019-01-16T20:05:44Z")
From Phineas and Ferb: The Movie-- the pamphlet, “So You’ve Discovered Your Pet Is a Secret Agent”. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 8:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/147 "2019-01-16T20:22:59Z")
Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying Thirty Days in the Samarkand Desert with the Duchess of Kent" by A. E. J. Eliott, O.B.E. The Amazing Adventures of Captain Gladys Stoutpamphlet and her Intrepid Spaniel Stig Amongst the Giant Pygmies of Beckles, Volume 8 ---
**Author:** ![Bibliothecarius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/b2d939/32.png) [@Bibliothecarius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bibliothecarius)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2019, 10:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/148 "2019-01-17T10:55:01Z")
Do you think you could possibly get a hold of the following for me? _If on a winter’s night a traveller_ by Italo Calvino _Outside the town of Malbork_ by Tazio Bazakbal _Leaning from the steep slope_ by Ukko Ahti _Without fear of wind or vertigo_ by Ukko Ahti _Looks down in the gathering shadow_ by Bertrand Vandervelde _In a network of lines that enlace_ by Silas Flannery _In a network of lines that intersect_ by Silas Flannery _On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon_ by Takakumi Ikoka _Around an empty grave_ by Calixto Bandera \*What story down there awaits its end? \* by Anatoly Anatolin I started reading them once but just never seemed to be able to finish them… ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2020, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/149 "2020-03-25T17:33:08Z")
Bumped. Cardinal John Brannox (John Malkovich) in the HBO series _The New Pope_ wrote a bestselling spiritual book, _The Third Way_, before his election as Pope John Paul III. ---
**Author:** ![DigitalC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ebca7d/32.png) [@DigitalC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DigitalC)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2020, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/150 "2020-03-25T17:51:15Z")
From The Good Place, Shakespeare’s The Tempest 2: Here We Blow Again ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2020, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/151 "2020-03-25T17:58:17Z")
The chapter about Uqbar that’s in some copies of the _Anglo-American Cyclopaedia_ ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2020, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/152 "2020-03-25T18:36:56Z")
_The Book of Sand_ is endless hours of fun for all ages! [ETA I see I already mentioned it. Never mind; get another copy.] Also Achmed-the-I-Just-Get-These-Headaches’s _Book of Humorous Cat Stories_ ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2020, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/153 "2020-03-25T22:32:52Z")
Can I add a fictional work that I entirely made up? If so, I would nominate Rabelais’s recently rediscovered lost novel _Pantagruel and the Antichrist_. Synopsis: Pantagruel the Giant receives an urgent summons from the Pope, and (after some delay and sidetracking) arrives in Rome. The Pope explains that a renegade prince has, by abandoning every principle of Christian society, created an earthly paradise in his realm, setting a dangerous example for the rest of Christendom. The Pope urges Pantagruel to stop the renegade. Pantagruel agrees to do this even though he ends up finding much about the prince’s experiment to admire, but concludes “men would never turn to God if they were happy in their sin”. Pantagruel’s two chief allies in this project are a cult of heretics, who moved to the prince’s realm to obtain religious freedom only to be disappointed that they weren’t permitted to impose their heresy on everyone else; and the jews, who rued the loss of their monopoly on moneylending. ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2020, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/154 "2020-03-26T03:48:51Z")
S. M. Stirling’s book Conquistador mentions some books written about the history of the world on the other side of the Gate. _The Rise and Fall of the Alexandrian Empire The Post-Alexandrian World Folk Migrations in Early Historic East Asia The Selang-Arsi Kingdoms The Eastern Iranians Post-Celtic Europe_ ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2020, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/155 "2020-03-26T15:53:14Z")
The book-within-a-short-story of the same title as George R.R. Martin’s 1979 “The Way of Cross and Dragon,” a heretical Gospel of Judas Iscariot in a fractured, distant-future Catholic Church. ---
**Author:** ![jackdavinci](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackdavinci/32/3259_2.png) [@jackdavinci](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackdavinci)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2020, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/156 "2020-03-26T20:19:19Z")
The novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 by Richard Brautigan concerns a “librarian of a very unusual California library which accepts books in any form and from anyone who wishes to drop one off at the library—children submit tales told in crayon about their toys; teenagers tell tales of angst and old people drop by with their memoirs—described as “the unwanted, the lyrical and haunted volumes of American writing” in the novel.” It’s been awhile so the only book I remember from it was a book about leather fetishes, constructed itself out of leather. But I’m sure there were other notable examples. Interestingly, in honor of the novel, a library in Burlington (since moved) started it’s own collection of unpublished works. ---
**Author:** ![jackdavinci](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackdavinci/32/3259_2.png) [@jackdavinci](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackdavinci)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2020, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/157 "2020-03-26T20:27:53Z")
The Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach and Enemy Mine by Barry Longyear both have spiritually themed quotes from books which only exist in those stories (I think The Handbook, and the Talmud, respectively). Though the latter got a few more passages and excerpts in the companion, The Enemy Papers. The novelization of the various Robotech series has a quote from a different in universe work at the beginning of each chapter, which I suppose makes it like 5% epistolary. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2020, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/158 "2020-03-27T03:20:13Z")
Isaac Asimov quoted from the voluminous, magisterial \*Encyclopedia Galactica \*at the beginning of many of his _Foundation_ stories. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2021, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/159 "2021-03-14T17:20:06Z")
The young Southern novelist Tom Yates, who becomes a speechwriter for the President and Mrs. Underwood in the Netflix political thriller series _House of Cards_, had earlier written _Scorpio_ and _God’s Cauldron._ ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2021, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444/160 "2021-03-14T22:26:47Z")
SInce this has been bumped, I hope everyone knows you can take any book (or sheaf of hand-written, or even blank pages) to an old school book-binder and get a nice cloth or leather cover… with _any title you want_ embossed on the cover and/or spine. I’ve done it. The cover was falling off my Bible and since I was leading a Bible Study at a camp, I figured it’d be cool to be teaching from my very own _Necronomicon_ (I realized later that I should’ve had “Abdul Alhazred” embossed underneath as the author). I also figured that anyone who’d be offended wouldn’t have read any Lovecraft anyhow, so I was safe… [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444.md?page=7) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-stock-the-ultimate-fictional-library/671444.md?page=9)