Animate books?

The Animate Book. A book which is "alive", often in and of itself (e.g. Al-Azif the Forbidden Grimoire from Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle^note And yes, his name is most probably a reference to the Necronomicon's purported original name of "Al Azif".) rather than simply being possessed by a soul/spirit that has an independent origin (e.g. a warlock binding a demon to his Tome of Eldritch Lore to harness its power) and thus acting as said soul/spirit's new "home"/prison. May or may not come with an Anthropomorphic Personification for communication/interaction purposes.

I've been looking for examples of Animate Books — specifically of the first variant described above — under Animate Inanimate Object, Tome of Eldritch Lore and Anthropomorphic Personification (since for some reason there's no book-centric subtrope of Animate Inanimate Object yet), but to my surprise, the two articles have a dearth of such examples. Either the concept is much rarer in fiction than I expected, or for some reason the examples are being under-recorded.

So far, I know of/found the following examples:

• Al-Azif the Forbidden Grimoire from Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle.
• The eponymous book of The Babadook.
• Winifred's book in Hocus Pocus.
• "The Book Bound in Pale Leather" in Chronicles of the Kencyrath.
• The Ildatch from The Shannara Series.
• Sophie's companion Plachta from Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book.
• Grimoires Weiss, Noir, and Rubrum from Nier.
• The eponymous books of The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.

Does anyone know of any more examples beyond these?

Edited by MarqFJA on Feb 16th 2020 at 4:19:08 PM

This sounds like something you should ask in the Trope Finder rather than here.

By "animate", you mean

• books that can move itself? Like opening itself, or flying, or biting people?
• books whose contents (pictures, writings etc) can move around in the pages?
• books that are their own entity, i.e "alive"? (I'm thinking of Tom Riddle's "diary")

There are many more angles we can see this through.

There's also "book golems"; creatures composed of books. And do tomes, scrolls, tablets and the like count?

Things I think count but aren't listed yet:

• The Pagemaster
• Peeps from Moshi Monsters
• The Monster Book of Monsters from Harry Potter

Edited by Pfff133 on Feb 18th 2020 at 12:37:51 PM

Only if I was specifically looking for a trope, rather than examples of a concept that may or may not be tropeable.

The third kind. In Mass Effect terms, I'm looking for the book version of EDI rather than Mira.

Edited by MarqFJA on Feb 20th 2020 at 2:48:35 PM

then it's not merely "animate". That's "living".

And more importantly, I think the first two cases I mentioned are tropes of their own too.

I used "animate" because it's more general than "living", which typically has an implication of either biological life or explicitly possessing an actual soul, something that arguably would not apply to an artificial intelligence that neither possesses biological components nor is a case of Haunted Technology.

"Sentient" books then?

Whatever the case, I wouldn't call it "animate". It's ambiguous (see my interpretations above on how)