public libraries

"It has been several months since monsters last plagued the town of Stermont, and frankly Alexander Bopp (leader of the Super Secret Monster Patrol) is bored, and misses his friends Rip (immersed in video games) and Nikki (soccer camp), so when his father signs him up for a summer maker program at the library he is happy to go--but soon he starts finding weird old-timey objects, and monster trading cards, and it starts to look like maybe monsters are back in Stermont"--Publisher provided.

Something is stealing machine parts from all over Stermont, including a wrecking ball from a local construction site, and Alexander and his fellow monster hunters, Rip, and Nikki, fear that it is building a Stermont-smashing machine--so the friends must use the resources of the summer maker program at the library to stop this monster, and perhaps even solve the mystery of who is leaving monster trading cards where the Super Secret Monster Patrol can find them.

Library page Baru Reddy loves horror stories so when the T. Middleton Nightengale City Library transforms into a ruined gothic cathedral complete with authors Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, and Charlotte Bronte, not to mention a host of zombie monks, he is not as alarmed as his fellow pages; he just needs to figure out a way to bring Mary Shelley's creation (made out of books, not body parts) to life to defeat the zombies--and who better to help than Ben Franklin, who is busy with his electricity experiments.

Every Saturday at noon precisely, the T. Middleton Nightingale City Library is transformed, and today Kelly, one of the library pages, arrives just in time to find herself inside the Labyrinth, confronting the Minotaur with Princess Ariadne; her fellow pages are nowhere in sight--and defeating the Minotaur is only the beginning, because other monsters of Greek mythology are also roaming the confusing corridors, and there seems to be no way out of this maze.

When library page Jordan Young falls asleep in the children's section of T. Middleton Nightingale City Library, she misses the initial transformation of the library and wakes up to find herself in the land of Lilliput, where the tiny people are fighting over how to crack an egg and a friendly giant from Brobdingnag is looking for her giant mischievous monkey.

At T. Middleton Nightingale City Library, when the old, broken clock strikes twelve, the library is transformed into something out of an author's mind--and today the volunteer pages find themselves in the middle of Edgar Allan Poe's imagination where monsters lurk, and a raven is telling them to find Lenore if they want to restore the library to normal.

Describes and categorizes hundreds of popular fantasy and science fiction titles, listing the works according to story, character, setting, mood, and language.

Explains how librarians can take a pro-active role in the library's function and become an effective advocate for intellectual freedom and patron privacy.

"Susan Orlean reopens the unsolved mystery of the most catastrophic library fire in American history, and delivers a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution--our libraries"--.

"Reopens the unsolved mystery of the most catastrophic library fire in American history, the 1986 Los Angeles Public Library fire, while exploring the . . . role that libraries play in modern American culture"--OCLC.