Washington Irving's essay "The Mutability of Literature" from The Sketch Book is a reflective piece on the transient nature of books and literary fame. It is notable for its imaginative setting within the British Museum Library and its melancholic, contemplative tone.
Sources for Washington Irving — The Mutability of Literature (from The Sketch Book)
Washington Irving — The Mutability of Literature (from The Sketch Book) in Fiction Set in Libraries
Held in the Fiction Set in Libraries chamber of the Babel Nexus Index.
- 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)
- M. R. James — The Tractate Middoth (from More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary) (1911)
- 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)