Joseph Ellis, the author of a first-rate study of the Founding Fathers, told his students that he had fought in Vietnam when the closest he came to combat was sitting in a university library.

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One day the caretaker at the Selden mosque was sitting next to Vinas in the public library and saw that he was staring at his computer, mesmerized by an account of Joseph Cohen, a Jew who converted to Islam.

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He selected the University of Tennessee because its catalogue was in the library of the American consulate in his home state of Chennai and happened to include a tear-out application.

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The small boy grew, the books changing round him, until he was in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library in Los Angeles, 30 years old, banging on a rented typewriter.

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"Being hand-written would have made it rare and valuable even when it was new, so it is not a surprise to find it shows signs of marks from the copper clasps which held its chains when it was in the nun's library, " he said.

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In the summer of 1983, Mr Dodge, who was once arrested for cutting down telephone poles, was reading in a Maine library when he found an 1825 copy of the Constitution.

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But when he was in the middle of a real-life incident, he waited in the library.

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He said 1.3 million books had been loaned in the last year, and the council was encouraging all library users to take part in the consultation.

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He was already passionate about history, often reading history books under the magnolia tree in front of Columbia's public library.

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In late 1995 Bland was stopped and released by a security man at the George Peabody Library in Baltimore just after he'd ditched his contraband and an incriminating notebook in the bushes.

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