Readers can never truly get enough of books, and the proof is in the pages: Even when we’re reading to escape to another world, we love when we encounter the familiar sights, sounds, and smells of places packed with shelves of old and new books. Bookshops and libraries tend to make appearances in many of my favorite sci-fi and fantasy tales, and they’re always a welcome addition to any fictional world. I never pass up a chance to explore a bookshop, even when I’m right in the middle of a story!
Here are five of my favorite bookish settings in SFF, featuring the kinds of bookshops and libraries designed to capture the imagination of any bookworm…
A.Z. Fell & Co (Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman)
Aziraphale is such a tease. He founded A.Z. Fell & Co in the 1800s as a place to store his incredible rare book collection. The problem? He doesn’t sell any of his books, so it’s essentially a massive personal library.
That doesn’t stop me from wanting to wander in through those big doors and peruse the volumes Aziraphale has found over the years. His shop has that undefinable je ne sais quoi every book lover knows. It’s a cozy, warm, dimly lit room full of comfortable furniture and natural ambiance that makes for a perfect reading environment.
While it’s a damn shame we can’t visit this heavenly bookshop in real life, RadioTimes got us close with last year’s excellent profile of the A.Z. Fell & Co set for the Good Omens TV series.
Thistleburr Booksellers (Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree)
Travis Baldree found a legion of fans with his breakout debut, Legends & Lattes. He struck gold again with Bookshops & Bonedust, a charming prequel that follows orc barbarian Viv as she recovers from a battle-related injury in a quaint seaside town.
Impatient and frustrated with being temporarily out of action and worried that her comrades won’t return for her, Viv finds solace in fixing up the town’s bookshop, run by a foul-mouthed rattkin named Fern. The bookshop starts off as a musty, ramshackle place reminiscent of many an older used bookstore, filled with dusty tomes.
Through hard work, a few grassroots marketing campaigns, and a bit of charm, the bookshop soon becomes a destination for readers of all sorts—poetry buffs, romantasy fans, and everyone in between. After it’s fixed up and finally thriving following years of neglect, Fern’s bookshop retains its homey feel. The result is a wonderful bookshop and a cornerstone of Murk, the seaside community that soon falls in love with books in a way that will be instantly familiar to any reader.
Natsuki Books (The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa)
Rintaro’s grandfather passes away and leaves him the local secondhand bookstore, Natsuki Books. The reclusive and antisocial Rintaro plans to close the shop and move in with his well-to-do aunt. When a talking cat saunters in, asking Rintaro to join him on a quest to save books, the whole plan goes awry. Rintaro becomes embroiled in an effort to “rescue” books from owners who don’t want the best for the stories within their pages.
Since I’ve written about my fondness for cats on Reactor in the past, you might be wondering whether my intentions are pure, including a book like this on such a list. “This guy loves cats,” you might say. “He just wants a talking cat to take him on a bookish quest.”
Of course I do. Sure, Natsuki Books is a charming shop full of rare and esoteric tomes containing vast sums of knowledge. But the prospect of being guided through a labyrinth of shelves and into corners of the world in dire need of help—the kind of help only a shy bookworm can provide—is just too good for me to pass up. When my quests are complete, I’ll curl up in the cozy nooks of Natsuki Books and reminisce on my adventures with my nose firmly lodged between the pages of my latest read.
The Library of the Neitherlands (The Magicians by Lev Grossman)
Imagine a library connecting all universes and collecting every single story, told or untold, within its infinite walls. If you can do this, then you have a sense of the expansiveness of the multiversal Library of the Neitherlands from Lev Grossman’s The Magicians series.
I wasn’t sure about including this one on this list, thanks to the sheer volume of knowledge in the library. It quite literally contains all the knowledge in the universe, and that’s a dangerous place to get lost in. What wonders and horrors might it hold? What might you learn about yourself, your dearest loved ones, or your greatest enemies if you could spend an hour or a day in this library? Or perhaps you would seek the answers to some of life’s big questions, whatever you deem them to be! The thought of it gives me chills both out of fear and excitement, and I ended up deciding to include the Library of the Neitherlands here because, if my safety was guaranteed, I’d definitely visit… for a while.
The Library (The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern)
Author Erin Morgenstern is no stranger to settings that overflow with magic, wonder, and whimsy. I loved her worldbuilding and descriptions in The Night Circus, and The Starless Sea carries on the tradition. The ancient underground library of The Starless Sea features mysteries and personal secrets galore, as protagonist Zachary discovers within the book’s pages.
Like the Library of the Neitherlands, this library is impossibly labyrinthine and absolutely massive. It is full of twists and turns and doors leading to odd places. And for any fans of felines who might be reading, it’s got plenty of cats. Leave it to Erin Morgenstern to take something utterly familiar to readers and turn it into a captivating and unforgettable fantasy locale. Perhaps one day, we’ll get to cross a painted threshold and see the place for ourselves…
Alright, readers—you know the drill! Please recommend your own favorite SFF bookstores and libraries in the comments below.
Magical libraries owe a lot to Borges’s ‘The Library of Babel’, that panopticon of a place where all knowledge is found. It sounds a little like Grossman’s library. Once you go in, would you ever come out? Would you ever want to?
Oh, the Library of Babel is an awful place. Once you go in you’re surrounded with unfathomably vast oceans of absolutely meaningless gibberish, and if by chance you search for centuries and find something that seems to have meaning, it is still meaningless, which means it is almost certainly wrong.
The Librarians in the story are not happy people. There’s a reason for that…
(Adding a search engine, as in Langford’s The Net of Babel, does not help at all. Search for something, you found it! … countless copies of it, surrounded by oceans of ever-changing absolutely meaningless gibberish, and what you found still exactly as meaningless as the surrounding text, in every case.)
Ozymandias Books, in I Met A Traveller in an Antique Land by Connie Willis. Hidden on an obscure Manhattan side-street, it appears to be simply a used-book store, but is in fact the mystical repository where a copy of any book will appear once it is the only one left in the world.
The Library in the Abhorsen books has lots of books, but it’s also a labyrinth, treasure vault, and prison for dangerous creatures. I’d love to explore, as long as I had a large magical dog with me.
I’ve had a soft spot for the titular Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore ever since I heard the short story version on Escape Pod.
I would brave the giant booklice for a chance at the magical library in Margaret Rogerson’s Sorcery of Thorns, or the snotty fae and various wards watching over the library in Analeigh Sbrana’s Lore of the Wilds.
What about the library from Unseen University from the Discworld? You have the librarian as your guide, of course, and through L-space is connected to every other library! Just don’t forget the banana
Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore!
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books from Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind tetralogy gets my vote.
Lucien’s library in the Dreaming, from Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” comics is near the top of my list. Every book ever imagined, even if none of it was ever written down? Finally, a place to read my work! :)
The hard part for me would be ever leaving.
(Forget about my works… I want to read the unwritten Pratchett & Banks novels!)
How about Wan Shi Tong’s Library from AtlA? Might not be the safest place to visit but there’s thrill seekers out there..
The Beast’s library from Beauty by Robin McKinley is a place I’d not mind visiting.
The libraries in Babel by Kuang felt like safe houses in a dangerous world.
The Library/Bookworld in the Tuesday Next novels, where characters live their beyond the page lives.
I don’t remember the book, but I read once of a library that collects books from across the Multiverse. I remember the detail that many authors will have multiple sets of “Completed works” of longer or shorter shelf space. No imaginary or unwritten books, but imagine the Master’s thesis to be developed comparing the sets!
One of the good scenes in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was the introduction of the Jedi Library in the Temple on Coruscant, and its wise librarian Jocasta Nu (even though it was missing information on at least one planet). Nothing like a library with information on a whole galaxy to get a bookworm’s attention!
I would love too visit the Invisible Library from Genevieve Cogman’s Series. It holds unique variations from all books that then serve as portals to the worlds they originate from. I guess it’s like discovering an interesting cover version of a song you like. I would also then love to explore (many) of the connected worlds.
Thanks for recommending Natsukawa Sosuke. I’m not a cat lover, but it sounds very interesting, so I’m picking it up for my next Japanese Learning Group read.
I would love to visit the Archives from Name of the Wind. Carefully, and without a candle. I hope we revisit the University when Pat Rothfuss feels ready to return to Temerant.
I’ll vote for Rebecca Thorne’s Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea. The writing is not as good as Baldree’s but the bookstore nailed my idea of a bookstore where I could spend hours relaxing and reading.
Don’t forget the library in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”.
All great libraries, but I must throw in the Grimm Legacy’s New York Circulating Material Repository – a lending library of books AND objects, contemporary and historical, common and obscure. In the repository’s basement lies the Grimm Collection, a room of magical items straight from the Grimm fairy tales, there the Wells Bequest handles science fiction tech, and the Poe Estate handles the horror items.
great library at Trantor. nuff said.