This makes me think of Umberto Eco's real life, and as a fiction writer. In real life he was a Professor of Semiotics, or the study of ancient writing and ciphering systems. In fiction, he often wrote of libraries - The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum are the most popular - and their mysterious and illustrious contents. Even his book Baudolino drew from this same well; the title character is an ancient Forest Gump, who happens to travel through a series of amazing parts of history. The punchline is that all the 'historical events' he witnesses are the made-up shit that wanna-be Marco Polos published... rivers of rocks... humans with their faces in their bellies, or who just had a single large foot and moved like kangaroos... So the Prof of Semiotics has access to these massive libraries of ancient books... and then writes a fiction book stitching together the most fantastical bits of the ancient stories he has read, into a modern novel. Amazing. I love him.