M. R. James's short story "The Tractate Middoth" is a classic ghost story centered around a search for a rare book in a library. It exemplifies James's signature style of subtle horror and scholarly protagonists, influencing subsequent supernatural fiction.
Sources for M. R. James — The Tractate Middoth (from More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary)
M. R. James — The Tractate Middoth (from More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary) in Fiction Set in Libraries
Held in the Fiction Set in Libraries chamber of the Babel Nexus Index.
- Washington Irving — The Mutability of Literature (from The Sketch Book) (1820)
- Gustave Flaubert — Bibliomania (1837)
- Charles Nodier — The Bibliomaniac (Le Bibliomane) (1841)
- Nathaniel Hawthorne — A Virtuoso’s Collection (from Mosses from an Old Manse) (1842)
- Anatole France — The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)
- Henry James — The Aspern Papers (1888)
- Eugene Field — The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac (1896)
- Anatole France — Penguin Island (1908)
- Edmund Lester Pearson — The Old Librarian’s Almanack (1909)
- William Thomas Lowndes — The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature (Bohn ed.) (1864)
- Isaac Asimov — Encyclopedia Galactica (in-universe device of the Foundation cycle) (1951)
- Gordon R. Dickson — The Final Encyclopedia (Childe Cycle) (1984)