Maggie Balistreri, the Poets House librarian, is careful to avoid vanity presses (which publish books at an author's expense) but embraces the pliable notion of the book as an art object, playful and tactile: poems are hidden in matchbooks, wrapped in cloth, rolled to resemble cigarettes, or, in the case of Dana T. Lomax's "Lullaby," curled inside a plastic prescription bottle.
Some drivers, including Mary Hartigan, who works for a freight-hauling company in Phoenix, take it upon themselves to be in-house librarians, circulating tapes among book-hungry colleagues, tracking which drivers crave biographies and which lap up Regency romances.
"It's one of those class distinction indicators that people like to hang onto to show that they're upper class," said Robin Harcourt Williams, the librarian at Hatfield House, the home of the very upper-class Cecil (rhymes with thistle) family.
Mr. Dicker grew up in the Bronx, the son of a federal housing lawyer and a librarian's assistant.
Mr. Costa, a City College librarian, bought his house — a mirror image of Mr. Ammiano's — in 2004.
Ms. Summers, who raises the curtain on her adventure-filled story in the room of the dying Casanova, returns to her hero's deathbed after chronicling his sad middle age and dismal twilight, spent as a librarian in the house of a Bohemian nobleman.
It is in Puddle Dock, which was a decrepit neighborhood destined to be razed under urban renewal until a campaign in the 1950s and '60s led by the town librarian saved 42 houses on 10 acres to create the museum.
"It gave the people a sense of self-worth," said Mr. House, a retired teacher and school librarian.
"Being married to an academic librarian, living in a house — that was not what she was comfortable committing her life to at that point," Burck says.
"The neighborhood really does need a grocery, so we figure we would put up with it," said Marie K. Erickson, a law librarian whose two-story house fronts Royal Street.
Leibniz was a mathematician (he and Sir Isaac Newton independently invented the infinitesimal calculus), a jurist (he codified the laws of Mainz), a diplomat, a historian to royalty, and a court librarian in a princely house.
