50 Fictional Librarians, Ranked

30. The Librarian, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966

Home library: San Francisco Public Library, Presidio Branch

Special talents: living happily in a very strange library that will take any book submitted, unpublished manuscripts and books written in crayon included.

Oh, modesty: “You must live a very lonely life with all the losers and dingalings, myself included, that bring their books in here.”

Fun fact: In 1990, a Brautigan fan named Todd Lockwood opened a version of the library imagined in this book in Burlington, Vermont and called it the Brautigan Library. It now lives in the Clark County Historical Museum Vancouver, Washington.

29. The Cheshire Cat, Thursday Next series

Home library: the Great Library

Special talents: Encyclopedic knowledge of every book in the library (“certainly more than twelve”), summoning.

Also known as: the Cat Formerly Known as Cheshire

Also known as: the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat

Also known as (to his mother): Archibald

Rings a bell: “Welcome to Jurisfiction. You’ll like it here; everyone is quite mad.”

28. Conan the Librarian, UHF, etc.

Home library: Perhaps your local library?

Special talents: Swordplay, holding large stacks of books, cutting patrons with late books right in half.

Unhelpful: “Don’t you know the Dewey decimal system?”

Introductory comments: “Never before in the history of motion pictures has there been a screen presence so commanding, so powerful, so deadly. He’s . . . Conan the Librarian!”

27. Peggy Cort, The Giant’s House

Home library: the Brewsterville Library

Special talents: The driest of wits, seeing below the surface, devotion

Smashing tropes: “Librarian (like Stewardess, Certified Public Accountant, Used Car Salesman) is one of those occupations that people assume attract a certain deformed personality. Librarians are supposed to be bitter spinsters; grudging, lonely. And above all stingy we love our fine money, our silence.”

26. Alicia Hull, Storm Center

Home library: Bartlesville Public Library (at least IRL)

Special talents: Steadfastness in the face of censorship, mentoring, Bette Davis eyes

Paranoia personified: “Sure she talks sweet as honey. All the time you can bet she was working away back there. She has twenty five years to fill those shelves with poison. She and those books of hers. All they want is one thing: smash and destroy. Smash everything we’ve ever built up in this country.”

Fun fact: Described by some as the first anti-McCarthyism film to be produced in Hollywood.

25. Henry DeTamble, The Time Traveler’s Wife

Home library: the Newberry Library, Chicago

Special talents: Involuntary time travel

Order = immortality: “Here all of nature was captured, labeled, arranged according to a logic that seemed as timeless as if ordered by God. . . The museum was dark, cold, and old, and this heightened the sense of suspension, of time and death brought to a halt inside its walls.

24. The Librarian, Snow Crash

Home library: the CIC database, formerly the Library of Congress

Special talents: moving “through the nearly infinite stacks of information in the Library with the agility of a spider dancing across a vast web of cross-references. The Librarian is the only piece of CIC software that costs even more than Earth; the only thing he can’t do is think.”

Stereotypical appearance: “like a pleasant, fifty-ish, silver-haired, bearded man with bright blue eyes, wearing a V-neck sweater over a work shirt, with a coarsely-woven, tweedy-looking wool tie. The tie is loosened, the sleeves pushed up.”

Same: “Sorry—but due to my internal structure, I’m a sucker for non sequiturs.”

23. Mr. Ambrose, Bob’s Burgers

Home library: Wagstaff School library

Special talents: Coaching cheerleading, but more importantly DRAMA, witchcraft (obviously)

The truth is whispered: “Books are great! No, use the internet, books are stupid!”

The truth is shouted: “Wake up Tina! Witches are everywhere!”

22. The Grey Lady, Ghostbusters

Home library: the New York Public Library

Special talents: Silence, book stacking, shapeshifting.

Fun fact: the famous Ghostbusters library ghost was portrayed by Ruth Hale Oliver, who was an author herself.

21. Brooks Hatlen, The Shawshank Redemption

Home library: Shawshank State Penitentiary library

Special talents: Animal Husbandry, surprising strength for an older gentleman

Last words: “Brooks was here.”