Montgomery de la Roche: I don't mean to gossip, but there's already been trouble in Oxford. Information Wants to Be Free, isn't that the charmingly naive saying? Well, the kind of information Lazarus College owns is capable of making its own prison break.
Arun Singh: Now they've closed off half the catacombs to stop it leaking out. I heard one grimoire made it as far as the Hedge Maze.
Here you will find, sitting side-by-side, such arcane titles as The Book of Eibon and The Book of Iod, the Celaneo, by Professor Laban Shrewsbury, the Latin version of the Cthaat Aquadingen, Cultes de Goules by the Comte d'Erlette Francois-Honore Balfour, De Vermis Mysteriis, the Dhol Chants, an uncensored edition of The King in Yellow, the Mad Arab's Necronomicon, the Pnakotic Manuscripts and their various Fragments, both the nine hand-written volumes of the Revelations of Gla'aki and Antonius Quine's corrected single volume, the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, the only remaining copy of the Testament of Carnamagos fastened with hasps of human bone, the suppressed seventh tome of the Englishman's Libros Sanguis, and the original German edition of Friedrich von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten. The forbidden knowledge contained within these pages is kept imprisoned between their covers and away from the curious eyes of mankind.
—Horrorology, by Stephen Jones
The familiar scent of leather and parchment greets him. Guardian magics whisper in the gloom, many evoked from the very grimoires this library was built to contained. Unlike their authors, these books were never burned. Father Grimaldi knows well what happens to those who trespass against this place. Given a tiny glimpse of the damnation that awaits them, some are driven mad with horror. Others find themselves compelled to sudden and violent suicide. He walks the razor's edge. Electric with fear, he passes silently between the dusty shelves - not daring to touch them lest some potent spark of his intention should ground itself through them and stop his heart, or shatter him like glass.
—Hellblazer: Mortification Of The Flesh
The Black Library houses all of the Eldar's most precious knowledge, and is said to resemble a vast, impossible craftworld that exists only within the labyrinth dimension. There is lore here regarding every deadly galactic mystery that the Eldar have ever encountered. The true nature of the ancient star-gods, the fate of the forsaken Phoenix Lord Arha, even the origins of Chaos itself are but the merest fragments of the Black Library's archives of the lost and the forgotten.
In particular, the library's collection focusses upon all that the Eldar know of Chaos, for it was Chaos that destroyed their civilization and threatens them from the Warp. Within the psychically-locked rooms of the Seething Spiral lie grimoires of dark magic, their whispers and snarls shivering the air despite layers of runic wards. Beneath the Dome of Stars Extinguished, countless caskets of moonthorn imprison daemonic artefacts and essences. Glowing lights drift through chambers in which ancient blades and alien skulls rest upon rune-carved plinths.
— Warhammer 40,000: Codex - Harlequins
Quentin had spent very little time in the Brakebills library. Hardly anybody did if they could help it. Visiting scholars had been so aggressive over the centuries in casting locator spells to find the books they wanted, and spells of concealment to hide those same books from rival scholars, that the entire area was more or less opaque to magic, like a palimpsest that has been scribbled on over and over past the point of legibility.
To make matters worse, some of the books had actually become migratory.
