📚 Libraries

The collection kept open: building types, funding fights, and the profession’s own literature.

Below are the 12 works carrying the subject libraries in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Encyclopedia of library and information science	Allen Kent	1968	55
	Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science	Allen Kent	1971	41
	The Five Laws of Library Science	S. R. Ranganathan	1931	15
	Library	Matthew Battles	2003	15
	The Library Book	Susan Orlean	2018	11
	Dewey	Vicki Myron	2008	9
	The Library	Stuart Murray	2009	7
	The Library	Andrew Pettegree	2021	6
	Libraries in the Ancient World	Lionel Casson	2002	3
	My librarian is a camel	Margriet Ruurs	2005	2
	Libraries of the future	J. C. R. Licklider	1965	1
	Ilmu perpustakaan & kode etik pustakawan	Wiji Suwarno	2010	1

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

Nearby shelves

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.