How to lose a book of cosmic importance in a library?

Hiya. Stumbled upon a problem with a plot I'm developing for one of my stories so I'd like to ask for help with it. As the title says, I need to have a very important, sacred book, be lost in a library. However, this is not an easy task because due to the technology in the setting and the importance of the book proper I seem to have written myself into a plausibility corner.

So, for some background. For my Pokemon Fan Fic, I'm having a special place, it is like the Library Of Babel in the sense that it holds books about the relevant Mc Guffins*

, foreign countries and their languages, courses on how to train your Bagon or any other common creature*

^{mostly courtesy of The Pokedex Extended Fanon Edition}

, and heck even one or two yet-to-be-deciphered books on Olympus Mons. All with one great difference: this library is not sunk under an immense desert but right in the middle of The City, with all the technological advantages that such a thing implies, like having access to the Magical Database that maintains the library catalogue, personnel dedicated to the sorting, researching and maintenance of the library material, and actually having a Hotlibrarian that will help the characters look for one book or two.

And is in this kind of setting where I have a very important (not for the plot though) book that I need to be lost. With "lost" I mean, essentially, that the book is still there in the shelves or the archive, or something, just that noone knows. The book, which is a form of an Apocalyptic Log was first donated to the library by an unknown researcher centuries ago and underwent studies for maybe a century, because of its arcane, undecipherable language, until at some point for a reason that I haven't decided yet, the book was just left alone to sit on the shelves.

The characters in my story are doing their Rotating Arcs until the direction the different events are taking lead them to visit the Library at the same time and reunite there, upon which the plots merge and the road to the final conflict is solidified. The characters will stumble upon the book by accident, and its contents are of no relevance to the plot and of no use for the characters; what is relevant to the characters and the plot is the recognition and further study of the language the book is written in.

As for how would I actually achieve this, I don't want do a copout like, say, a psychic mindwipe on knowledge about the book because, for one, I want to stay away from legendaries actively immersed in the plot — for as much as I can*

. I can't simply have the book be leaned and not returned, as that would leave an official trail, and I definitively can't have it stolen as the book actually has to be there; an unofficial lease would have the same problems.

However, for what little I know about how does a library operates, even if the book somehow went to the wrong shelf the Magical Database would have record of its existence and thus it being missing would be noticed the next time someone does shelf or inventory maintenance, I guess. While the book would be regarded as "that weird thing that no one has managed to decode and no one cares", such a description is, by itself, actually a call to attention. The closest thing I can construct on my own right now is that during one of the inventory passes, the book is miscatalogued or mistakenly sent to a stack of damaged / repeated / otherwise unattended books where it's not going to be noticed because, well, truly, how often does someone come looking for the Tomes of Eldritch Lore or something? They'd have to have explicit interest in the subjects addressed and/or explicit knowledge of the existence of the book itself.

Now, I do have a couple of things, setting and plot wise, that can help me, but I haven't figured how well can I use them. For one, there is a Breloom (a fighting Pokémon) living and working at the Library (it's a settings quirk, some Pokémon can hold employment on their own). In exchange for his services he is allowed to pick some rarely requested books for himself to keep, however I'd guess he'd choose graphic novels, training tutors and the like, definitively not something apocalyptic written in a language lost to history. For two, the city the library is in, as well as the country as a whole, underwent a time of disaster some ten years (tops) before the events in the plot, which caused important social disarray in the most populated cities and required some important buildings to be repaired or rebuilt; however, if anything, I'd guess that, also, would have caused more attention than less to focus in the Library.

For the record, I've been trying to learn how a library works, but while I did learn some basic things when I was a little cute thing, those were mostly related to how a book is donated or moved from a library and not about its operation proper, and the one library close to my place requires two buses to go to, which has made it quite unwieldy to go do research into at this time of the year.

I'd welcome opinions on any plot or setting vector that I can use to help that book being lost somewhere in that place. If you happen to know closely how a library works, or if you have ideas for other, wide applications of psychic or similar powers that are not "make everyone forget", or anything you have to suggest, I'd welcome it.

All thanks in advance.

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?

Is there any way the book could be reigstered as "checked out" without actually leaving the library, and therefore there wouldn't be any reason to keep track of it for two weeks or so?

Ok, first off, libraries don't, as a rule, do "physical inventories" in the sense of "methodically taking every book off the shelves and out if the back storage areas and checking them against the inventory list". If it's in the list as "acquired" and not on the list as "discarded" they presume that they still have it. *

So you can ignore that.

So, if you want it to be present but not findable, the question becomes "was it deliberately hidden at some point by someone, or is it innocently lost?"

The easiest way for someone to deliberately hide it would be for them to put it in a different cover, so that it's shelved in a different section from where it should be. For this, they would want to choose a cover that makes it appear to be a book that very few, if any, people are going to ever look at. It could also have been deliberately hidden physically — behind or under a bookshelf is always good.

If you want to go for the "innocently lost" version, books that there is little or no call for are often put into storage, rather than being given precious shelf space. And boxes get misplaced in storage areas. Or mislabeled. Or hidden behind other things that were put into storage later. If it's been in the storage area for a couple of centuries, lord only knows what's been stacked on top of and in front of the box it's in. Or the box may have started to collapse, so the contents were moved to another box, which wasn't properly labeled. Or both — the mislabeling may have happened decades or centuries ago, and now the mislabeled box is at the bottom and the back of a stack of miscellaneous stuff.

Whether the recent disaster caused more attention to focus on the library rather than less really is up to you, but in general, unless the library is the (or a) main reason the city exists, very few people are going to be concerned with it. And there again, the active part of the collection — the books that are in demand — are going to be the main focus.

edited 3rd May '11 8:49:10 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

The book can magically be trying to hide itself.

The book may be one of many obscure ones.

You may be trying too hard to find reasons for it not to be hidden. If you're really worried about the magical tracking system, just remember that you can explain it a number of ways, including there being too much magic involved in tracking so many books. That'd just create interference and so it's not worth it.

Also, the outside of a book can say one thing, but the inside...can be another.

edited 3rd May '11 8:52:43 PM by blueharp

Would a library adopting a barcode system for the first time go through every book and tag it, including those in said backrooms? Or just the books in regular circulation?

Obviously it's easier to fall through the cracks if the book never even got registered in the computer.

Do you highlight everything looking for secret messages?

In theory, they'd do every book, including those in storage. In theory. But the possibility of it never even having been entered into the Huge Wonderful Database is a good thought.

And here's some numbers to consider: The Library of Congress's current collection is a only couple years shy of 200 years in the accumulating. It's currently roughly 130 million items — 32 million of those items are catloged books. The rest are photos, manuscripts, newspapers, magazines, films, maps sheet music, microfilm reels, and sound recordings.. They add 10,000 new items every day. The building contains 530 miles of bookshelves. It takes up three separate buildings. The library you're talking about sounds like it would be the equivalent for your world.

edited 3rd May '11 9:31:28 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Thanks for the comments in. Answering back to some of the ideas and details:

Well, there is, I mean for example the library people could register the book as checked out in order to hide the fact that is still there, but if that was the case it would have been long in the past and no one would know now. It maps into what Madrugada said about whether the book is innocently or deliberately lost. While I don't know the exact answer, I'm leaning towards innocently lost, in particular because I can't think of a character in my setting who would want to deliberately hide the book.

It is a good point, the book could have been moved around pretty much all across and around the Library during the last centuries, perhaps ending in the same box where a dusted cover of a children's tale like, say, The Little Skarmory That Could.

If I want that to hold, however, I need to have a concept-proof way to avoid having say, a librarian checking the name of the book and have a psychic concentrate on it to find out where it is...

I think I can work with something like that, as I already have the sorts of Psychic-type interference happening naturally in the setting. Without advanced, instant help for the amount of material existing in the library, it would simply not be worth the time to look for it unless someone explicitly comes looking for it and offering quite a high amount of cash.

Which reminds me...

It would be comparable in purpose, yes, although I'm not sure how spread in timeline the documents in that library are nor how digitalized the archiving process is. Time for extra research. I'll put up those numbers to study and check the plausibility that the book didn't even make it into the Magical Database.

As soon as I have some extra thoughts in these regards, I'll answer back. It took some time for me to formulate the reply and some extra posts came in the meantime. So I hope if given the case that excuses a double post.

And also many thanks Madrugada for the Library of Congress numbers. Look fun to play with.

I know I sometimes overdo research, and maybe you guys are right that I'm worrying about it too much. I just want it to be infalible enough given that it has to have lasted that way for a large amount of generations.

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?

Well, to be honest, the longer a book is lost, the higher the likelihood that it will stay lost goes. I don't know about lifespans in your world, but if it was misplaced long enough ago, it's conceivable that no one who would remember that it ever was there in the first place is still alive. It's like you said — for them to realize it's lost, someone has to figure out that it's supposed to be there in the first place.

And the "deliberately hidden" could have been for a completely innocent reason — someone who wanted to be sure that it was available to them whenever they wanted, with no risk that someone else would have it. Hell's bells, I did that when I was in school if there was a book that I wanted for an assignment but that I didn't need right then — putting it in the wrong place on the shelves was a good way to reduce the chances that someone else would have it when I wanted it. And if I'd done that, then been prevented from going back to the library somehow... well ... that book would be mis-shelved until someone stumbled onto it.

edited 3rd May '11 10:19:13 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Magic tracking system?

It's magic, you can make it work-or not work-however you like.

Perhaps the book was there before they started tracking, and it got left out of the inventory?

Perhaps the book is magical itself, and therefore can't be tracked.

Or maybe the magic extends from the books, and they seek to conceal this one.

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

The book is possessed. There's plenty of Ghost-Types that could do it - a Spiritomb seems appropriate, unless you've got some relevance in mind for such a thing. As such, the book possesses a kind of SEP field - it's right where it ought to be, but no one can see it properly.

...Which obviously suggests that the ideal candidate for finding it should be a Normal-Type, who are immune to Ghost-type trickery.

In the event of a firestorm, the salad bar will remain open.

Well, when I said a Magical Database, I meant a CSI style database, but I guess can be helped with "magic" (as understood from our view in a Pokéverse) as well. Still it's gonna run against problems of its own. I'm thinking that, since the current technology may be based off some Precursor technology, the book itself could "hack in" to avoid being detected, or remove tracks of its presence, but right now that looks like going needlessly deep (plus it means giving the book some sort of sentience or awareness).

Also before I forget:

You were eeeevil, er... cooool, Madrugada...

Anyway, I'm having it so far that yeah, for the people at the Library even trying to search for the book would be more expensive than what is worth if they knew they're supposed to look for it.

So far so long, the book was, most likely, misshelved shortly after the research on it was done. Since the researchers and librarians couldn't make heads or tails from its contents, it eventually became little more than a doorstopper that popped around at random places, and eventually the few people who cared just got bored from it and/or died of age. If the book was ever registered in the Magical Database, which given its origin and nature I assume it did, there was perhaps a Magical Great Crash. It could have been recent enough and since no one did care about the book anyway, it is as good as lost. That, or the book was removed from the database to take it to a better research place, but the transport proper never took place.

That's still requiring me to make sure all other databases don't know about the book, but I think I have something that can handle that.

If I'm getting all this solid enough, this could even allow me to have the book in a random but not too hidden box that could be found if someone actually cared to look deep enough, and was awake enough to notice that "this book is not like the others". All that matters, plot-wise, is that the protagonists kind of bump with the book; one of the characters has minor previous experience with the arcane language, but still enough to add to other minor events and prompt the protagonists to try do something, anything, with it once they undust it.

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?

I was an intern at a library last summer. It was a mess. First off, entering a book into the system or changing it's shelf number involved going into the Big Computer. There had been all these budget cuts, so we didn't have anybody whose job it was to do that, so (in the wise way of bureaucracy) it couldn't be done by anybody. Maybe the library upgraded it's system a few decades ago, and your book slipped through the cracks of the new system into permanent limbo.

Secondly, books go missing all the time. They fall behind shelves or get shelved in the wrong places, people steal them or maybe fucking gremlins steal them, I don't know. When there was nothing else for me to do my boss had a long, long list of books people had tried to check out and couldn't find —because thats the only way the librarians know if something isn't there— and I got to comb through the stacks for them. I only found about half of the ones I looked for, and I was really looking.

Third scenario: Random shit. Your book gets accidently shelved wrong. Or, it was on loan to another institution, came back, and simply never got checked back in. It gets soaked in coffee and set aside by a caring librarian who never comes back for it. Or, a librarian takes an interest in it, and it sits around the office for a while before getting buried in a stack of miscellaneous books that need to be looked at (ie. misnumbered, missing number, duplicate number, damaged number, from a different library, and so forth) that just sit there because there's too much to get done and who wants to spend half and hour wrestling out what to do with one book? (The interns, that's who.)

Fourth scenario: The reshelve shelf. Returned books get loaded onto carts behind the desk and carted off to whatever part of the library they belong to. There, they are put on a special shelf, in no particular order, until some long-suffering intern is sent to sort through things and reshelve them one by one. Again, a missing or confusing number means that unless someone takes some initiative, your book will sit there indefinitely. Maybe it gets puts up on the top, unused shelf that no one can see without getting a stepladder. Books on the reshelve shelf are actually cleared for circulation though, so your characters could check a book out if they found it there and liked it.

Basically, go whatever you feel like is plausible. Libraries might look all neat and alphabetized when you're walking through, but in reality they are a confusing, frustrating, constantly problem-riddled system with lots of cracks to hide things in.

O Manarha! Hatar-ue, dihalt urta. Vakat iu e Uratan, e banatar in.

Vesperis, thanks for filling in the details on all the ways a book can go astray. My time working in libraries was years ago — before computers, in fact (in the mid 70's) so I was cautious about making too exact of a statement about how, exactly, to lose it.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

"If the book was ever registered in the Magical Database, which given its origin and nature I assume it did, there was perhaps a Magical Great Crash."

Perhaps an electrical problem caused by naughty Electric-types feeding off of the power grid? That seems to happen a lot in that universe.

If I'm asking for advice on a story idea, don't tell me it can't be done.

Vesperis, thanks for the details. There's a lot of info there I had no idea about.

I'm checking some documents about distributed databases and consulting some people who are more in the field than me to see how plausible a Magical Great Crash is, but I think if I can have it have happened at a particularly vulnerable moment, the problem is pretty much solved.

Now for some snark. As of now, the Great Book is in a randomly (mis)placed box of documents on Dunsparce physiology. No one has found those for a while .

edited 5th May '11 8:32:16 AM by SilentReverence

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?